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CITIES OF PAUL 



CITIES OF PAUL 



2£>eacon£ of tfje g^ajsft reftinttfeti 
for tfte $te$mt 



BY 



WILLIAM BURNET WRIGHT 

AUTHOR OF " ANCIENT CITIES, FROM THE DAWN TO 
THE DAYLIGHT" 




BOSTON AND NEW YORK 

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & COMPANY 

(@bz ftitoergi&e pre$j, Cambridge 

1905 



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Copyngni tnirj 

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COPYRIGHT I905 BY WILLIAM BURNET WRIGHT 
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 



Published November iqoj 



TO MY CHILDREN 



TO THE READER 

The diseases which infected all and 
ruined most of the cities mentioned in 
this book are not strangers among us. 
Political rings more insolent and more 
rapacious than that which plundered 
Tarsus are objects familiar to most 
Americans. The greed that turned into 
bandits the merchants of Corinth has 
perverted into depredators upon the 
community some, at least, of those sol- 
diers without uniforms, whose legitimate 
business is to defend it from hunger and 
cold and nakedness. Roman contempt 
for the helpless slave has reappeared in 
that brutal indifference to the public wel- 
fare shown alike by syndicates of capital 
and combinations of labor ; upper and 
nether millstones grinding the rest of us 
between them. Many trustees of enor- 
mous revenues confided to their charge 



viii TO THE READER 

for use in visiting the fatherless and 
widows in their affliction do not appear 
to have kept themselves unspotted from 
the world. The taint of the spirit which 
degraded Greek athletics is said to have 
touched even our universities. These, 
and other facts of which the effects are 
traced in these pages, appear, when illu- 
mined by the " Beacons of the Past," 
sufficiently alarming. 

But there are signs of better things to 
come. A general insurrection against the 
usurped authority of spoilsmen and the 
forces of organized injustice has begun. 
It is gaining strength. Shifty politicians 
who have led the people by the tinkle 
of party names as bell-wethers lead 
sheep are bewildered by a new spirit 
with which their experience has not 
taught them how to cope. In many 
places they have seen themselves dis- 
regarded, and their henchmen outvoted 
in favor of what they have despised 



TO THE READER ix 

as cc Sunday-school politics." The men 
whose popularity to-day eclipses all other 
reputations are those who have shown 
the disposition and ability which enabled 
Gideon to cast down the altar of corrup- 
tion that defiled his home, and to break 
the power of its ministers. 

Young men — in whom is the hope 
of the Republic — are enlisting with un- 
selfish enthusiasm and in constantly in- 
creasing numbers to fight the good fight. 
The corrupters are hard pressed. The 
only dangers honest men need fear are 
those which arise when enthusiasm grows 
weary in well doing. Against that temp- 
tation may this little book help to brace 
true patriots by leading them in hours 
of discouragement or apparent defeat to 
ponder the experiences of that preemi- 
nent reformer who, when he was weak, 
was strong because he felt that he could 
" do all things " through the One who 
strengthened him. 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I. Tarsus, the City of Paul's Youth i 

II. Ephesus, the City of Superstitions 25 

III. Philippi, the City of the Suicides 58 

IV. Thessalonica, the City of the Sufferers 79 
V. Old Corinth, the City of the Athletes 1 1 6 

VI. New Corinth, the City of the Parvenus 140 

VII. Colossae, the City of the Slave 163 

VIII. Ancyra, the City of the Weathercocks 1 84 

IX. Tyana, the Pagan Bethlehem 208 



CITIES OF PAUL 



TARSUS . 

THE CITY OF PAUL'S YOUTH 

At the angle formed by the junction of 
the Syrian coast-line with that of Asia 
Minor the land is dented by a small 
thimble-shaped inlet tilting east of north. 
Upon its shore the Phoenicians built a 
city, after which it was called " the Gulf 
of Myriandros." The Greeks built an- 
other, which gave it the name of Issus. 
A third, founded by Alexander to com- 
memorate his conquest of Darius, caused 
it to be permanently designated cc the 
Gulf of Alexander." 

Even Celtic irreverence would scarcely 
venture to clip the august name at which 
the ancient world grew pale into " Sandy 
the Great." But "Iskander" is Turk- 



2 CITIES OF PAUL 

ish for " Alexander/' There seems no 
harm in docking that. "Alexander's 
Gulf" has therefore come down to us in 
the undignified form of " Scandaroon." 

Stretching westward from this inlet for 
sixty miles and extending thirty in aver- 
age width, inclosed on the north and 
west by rugged mountains and on the 
south by the Mediterranean Sea, lies the 
Cilician plain. Sterile now, it was once 
a fertile prairie. No other equal portion 
of the earth's surface has been rendered 
so famous by the battles fought upon its 
breast or waged upon its borders. Near 
its western boundary and dominating the 
entire region so completely that we may 
venture to call the whole plain, as Jose- 
phus says "it was called of old/' " Tar- 
sus," stood the City of Paul's Youth. 

Three hundred and thirty-two years 
before the birth of Christ Persia was the 
one conspicuous nation in the world. 
For weight of influence she bore to other 



TARSUS 3 

nations much the same relation which 
at present England bears to Egypt or 
France to Morocco. Those living at that 
time may have heard rumors of military 
preparations in the north of Greece. 
Compared with the kinglet who was mak- 
ing them, the Persian monarch appeared 
as the Russian Czar, before his prestige 
was destroyed, would have looked beside 
the King of Belgium. Had the kinglet 
been asked whither he was going, the 
reply might have been, "To Tarsus, for 
the conquest of the world ! " 

Had you lived forty-one years before 
the birth of Christ, you might have seen 
in the harbor of Egyptian Alexandria a 
vessel loading with purple and gold and 
pearls and perfumes. Had you asked its 
owner, "Whither shall it bear you? " the 
reply, spoken without an error or a trace 
of foreign accent in either one of seven 
languages, and spoken in a voice of 
such alluring sweetness that to resist its 



4 CITIES OF PAUL 

enchantment seemed beyond the power 
of mortal man, might have been, " I am 
going to Tarsus to conquer the world !" 

A little later the Cilicians saw a gilded 
barge gliding up the Cydnus, propelled 
by sails of purple silk and oars of silver, 
which kept time to the music of flutes. 
Upon the deck beneath a canopy of cloth 
of gold reclined the Sorceress of the Nile. 
Lovely children winged as cupids clus- 
tered around her couch ; fair women 
adorned as graces handled the tackling 
of twisted gold and silver or flung upon 
the air the costliest of Arabian perfumes. 
At Tarsus the enchantress stepped upon 
the shore, entered the Agora, smiled 
upon Mark Antony, then the virtual 
sovereign of the earth, and led him a 
willing captive with her jeweled hand. 

Had you lived eleven centuries after 
the birth of Christ, you would have heard 
Europe clanging with arms. The ablest 
captain of his age, the devoutest of the 



TARSUS 5 

German Caesars and — made so by that, 
I think — beyond comparison the most 
commanding of them all, was gather- 
ing into his army the ablest warriors 
of Christendom. The seventy winters 
which had changed his luxuriant beard 
from red to white had purified his am- 
bitions and increased his authority. Ask 
him whither he is going, and he will 
answer, " To Tarsus, to conquer the 
Orient for Christ ! " Near Tarsus you 
might have seen the same waters which 
attacked but spared the life of Alexander 
and floated the barge of Cleopatra stab 
to death with their icy chill the body of 
Barbarossa. 

Had you been alive when Christ was 
born, you might have seen a little boy 
playing in a garden at Tarsus. Had you 
asked him whither he was going, he could 
not have told you, but we can reply, 
" He was going from Tarsus to conquer 
the world ! " 



6 CITIES OF PAUL 

The empire Alexander founded at 
Tarsus endured ten years. The sover- 
eignty Cleopatra established at Tarsus 
lasted a few months. The army of 
Frederick melted away when, near Tar- 
sus, its leader died. But for nineteen 
centuries the victories of the boy from 
Tarsus have multiplied with the years, 
and you, reader, whatever your creed 
may be, are, by reason of the civiliza- 
tion which has moulded you, a captive 
of his bow and of his spear. 

A visit to his birthplace and early 
home will help us to know him, because 
the impressions received in childhood 
are the chisels of character and make 
the " child the father of the man." Pass- 
ing many facts which justified the Apos- 
tle's civic pride and warranted him in 
calling his birthplace " no mean city," I 
ask your attention to those only which 
shed light upon himself. 

I. Paul was by inheritance a Roman 



TARSUS 7 

citizen. His birth at Tarsus fostered in 
him a consciousness of that dignity 
more powerfully than birth in Rome 
itself would have done. For Tarsus, 
though in culture the rival of Athens 
and Alexandria, in commerce a metro- 
polis, and in importance to the imperial 
navy without a peer, was not one of 
those cities in which birth carried with 
it the rights of Roman citizenship. The 
few, therefore, in Tarsus who possessed 
that distinction would be more eminent 
among their neighbors than the many 
in Rome who possessed it would be 
among theirs, for the same reason which 
makes an Englishman more conspicuous 
in Calcutta than in London. Born the 
equal of any subject, he was bred where 
that inheritance was peculiarly signifi- 
cant. It is not strange, therefore, that he 
alone of the Apostles showed at all times 
a sense of high worldly station. His 
aristocratic consciousness was ingrained. 



8 CITIES OF PAUL 

In boyhood it became a part of him- 
self. It was nourished by the deference 
showed everywhere to birth and breed- 
ing. It never left him. Witness the 
calm dignity of his address to the com- 
mander of Antonia ; the quiet author- 
ity with which he called to account 
the magistrates of Philippi whom other 
Jews in that city would have approached 
as Shylock approached Bassanio ; the 
unembarrassed mien with which he re- 
buked Agrippa and instructed Festus. 
Though a Roman he was also an Israel- 
ite, and an Israelite of the highest class. 
That he counted a greater honor than 
even Rome could confer. We shall gain 
a fairly accurate conception of his feelings 
toward Rome on the one hand and Jeru- 
salem on the other by thinking of Mon- 
tefiore or Disraeli, than whom no Jews 
were prouder of their Hebrew lineage 
and no Englishmen more loyal to their 
British birth. This twofold inheritance 



TARSUS 9 

fitted Paul to become first an apostle, 
and secondly an apostle to the Gentiles. 
II. Another characteristic of St. Paul 
was his keen sense of civic responsibility. 
He alone of the Apostles — if we may 
judge from their writings — saw in the 
duties of citizenship a miniature of what 
Christians owe to the new Jerusalem. It 
is difficult to imagine John or James or 
Peter saying, " Our citizenship is in 
heaven ; . . . therefore, my brethren, so 
[i. e. as faithful citizens] stand fast in the 
Lord." But for some reason Paul had 
learned to think of the kingdom of God 
as a municipality in which every citizen 
was faithful to his civic obligations. 1 

1 Excepting Hebrews viii, 1 1 , a quotation from 
one whose civic consciousness was exceedingly alert, 
the words " citizen,' ' " citizenship," and their cor- 
related verb occur, I believe, but eight times in the 
New Testament; five times in expressions attributed 
to Paul, twice in those assigned to Luke, Paul's 
companion, and perhaps his amanuensis, and once 
from the lips of a Roman officer. 



io CITIES OF PAUL 

This seems to be the reason. During 
the generation preceding his birth Tar- 
sus had been a prey to thieves like those 
who have robbed and, what is worse, 
come near to murdering the manhood of 
certain cities in the United States. The 
" Boss " of the putrid ring was named 
Boethus. Mark Antony promised Tar- 
sus a gymnasium, — probably a new one 
more magnificent than that which ap- 
pears to have been already standing on 
the left bank of the Cydnus, — and ap- 
pointed this well-known scoundrel super- 
intendent and custodian of the funds 
for its construction, for the scamp had 
flattered the general's vanity by writing 
a silly poem in praise of the victory at 
Philippi. When Antony reached Tar- 
sus certain civil service reformers who 
were not afraid to speak out plainly told 
him how plausible and slippery a knave 
Boethus was. Among other charges they 
proved that he had secreted for his own 



TARSUS ii 

pocket's profit even the gymnast's oil. 
The rascal made no attempt to deny the 
accusation. His sole defense was this : 
"O most noble Antony, as Homer sung 
the praises of Achilles and Agamemnon, 
so have I sung yours. Ought I to be 
brought before you on a charge like 
this ? " 

The reformers replied, " Homer 
never stole oil, and you have ! " 

To those who are not politicians the 
reply may appear adequate. But it did 
not satisfy the triumvir. Through his 
vanity the prosecution failed. Boethus, 
made more brazen by its failure, stole 
with increased effrontery. But the re- 
formers were in earnest. They were of 
a different type from those who shriek 
themselves hoarse over the corruptions 
of a ring and vote at the next election 
to continue it in power. They perse- 
vered, and the Providence who always 
helps such men helped them. 



12 CITIES OF PAUL 

For a time Boethus treated them as 
Mr. Tweed treated the reformers of 
New York, — sneered, "What are you 
going to do about it ? " 

But the Power who, even to energetic 
and persistent patriots, sometimes seems 
dead but never is, in his own good time 
abolished Antony and put in his place 
an honest emperor, Augustus. Now 
there was a man of rare ability and per- 
fect integrity, a native of Tarsus, who 
had been the tutor of Augustus, and had 
earned that sovereign's entire confidence. 
His name was Athenodorus. When the 
cry of the reformers reached Rome, Au- 
gustus appointed this man governor of 
their city. Athenodorus broke up the 
ring, banished Boethus with his hench- 
men, pounded the " organization " into 
powder, and governed the city so well 
that upon his death the citizens voted 
him divine honors, and established an an- 
nual festival to commemorate his virtues. 



TARSUS 13 

All this occurred in the last generation 
before Paul, and Paul was born before 
Athenodorus died. In his boyhood the 
Apostle must have witnessed many times, 
perhaps taken part in, the celebration 
of "Athenodorus' Day," as American 
boys are familiar with " Washington's 
Birthday." 

The mention in the Epistle to the 
Philippians of " citizenship in heaven " 
seems to me a window through which 
one may see the battle between Tarsus 
and the ring that disgraced it. Can poli- 
ticians who have fattened upon corrup- 
tion in modern cities be described more 
accurately than in these words which the 
memory of Boethus may well have sug- 
gested, " For many walk, of whom I 
have told you often, and now tell you 
even weeping, that they are enemies of 
the cross of Christ ; whose end is de- 
struction, whose God is their belly, and 
whose glory is their shame, who mind 



14 CITIES OF PAUL 

earthly things. For our citizenship is in 
heaven, from whence also we look for the 
Saviour Jesus Christ." 

III. It will be remembered how often 
St. Paul refers to the Greek games, not 
only in writing to the Corinthians, where 
he could scarcely avoid doing so, but 
elsewhere. Foot-races, boxing, hitting 
the mark — words from these sources 
fall from his pen as if they belonged to 
his mother tongue. Dean Howson has 
counted in the Pauline Epistles thirty re- 
ferences to Greek athletic sports, and adds 
that he has not exhausted the list. This 
is remarkable for two reasons. Paul was 
a Jew, and the Jews hated these naked 
sports because they counted them ob- 
scene. He was a Christian, and the Chris- 
tians hated them because they thought 
them cruel. I do not remember any 
allusion to them by the other Apostles, 
though John and Peter must have been 
frequently brought in contact with them. 



TARSUS 15 

What led Paul to make so much of 
them ? Is not this the explanation ? 

His boyhood was spent in Tarsus. 
There Greek manners prevailed. No 
boy could have breathed the atmosphere 
produced by the Greek passion for ath- 
letics without yielding in some degree 
to its influence. The gymnasium where 
the athletes trained and where the young 
men found a school more attractive than 
their famous university must have been 
for the youth of Tarsus a centre of in- 
terest. The games were to them more 
than football and boating are to the 
universities of England and America. 
Could the boy Paul altogether escape 
the infection ? One cannot imagine the 
Apostle as a spectator watching the con- 
tests at Isthmia, yet he shows a famili- 
arity with the minutest details of their 
management and practice which could 
have been obtained only by frequent 
observation. This is not surprising if in 



1 6 CITIES OF PAUL 

later life he drew his illustrations from 
the recollections of his boyhood, as all 
men are prone to do. 

Of metaphors and illustrations drawn 
from Roman soldiers he has left us more 
than twelve. He seems to have liked 
military men and to have felt at home 
with them. I incline to think this, too, 
was owing to his birth at Tarsus. The 
mountains north of that city and only 
twenty miles away were infested by bri- 
gands who made themselves a terror to 
the whole Cilician plain until, not very 
long before the Apostle's birth, they were 
subdued by Cicero. Though I do not 
know that it was so, it seems likely that 
the soldiers sent to protect the city from 
further depredations dwelt at Tarsus, 
and that the citizens they protected 
learned to value them as friends. 

IV. Few passages in the Apostle's 
writings have been so much misunder- 
stood as those in which he appears to 



TARSUS 17 

depreciate intellect and learning. " The 
wisdom of this age," he wrote, " is fool- 
ishness with God." Many have fancied 
that here and in similar passages he 
meant to disparage the spelling-book, 
and all that it stands for. The most un- 
lettered reader ought to be guarded from 
that delusion, by noticing that more 
than any other New Testament writer 
St. Paul honors the human intellect by 
appeals to its powers of reasoning and 
capabilities of knowledge. 

When he wrote " the wisdom of this 
age," he was thinking of such instruction 
as was given at the University of Tarsus, 
familiar to him from his youth. The uni- 
versities of Athens, Alexandria, and Tar- 
sus were then all and more than all that 
Oxford and Cambridge are to England 
or Harvard and Yale to America. There 
is no indication that the Apostle was fa- 
miliar with the great Greek thinkers. In 
the places those men had occupied three 



1 8 CITIES OF PAUL 

centuries before, silly professors now 
rattled like dried peas in a pod. They 
were the prototypes of those mediaeval 
school-men who wasted their time de- 
bating how many angels could stand 
upon a needle's point. The problems 
they discussed were for the most part as 
trivial as they were insoluble. They cared 
nothing for facts. Their boast was that 
they could take any side of any question, 
and by tricks of logic prove that it was 
true. They were called " Sophists ,J or 
in English " wise men." It was to their 
pseudo-wisdom St. Paul referred. With 
the like of these foolish chatterers he was 
frequently confronted during his Gentile 
ministry. At Tarsus he had learned to 
understand them. They had filled its air 
with their silly twaddle. In his youth 
he had heard their harangues contrasted 
with the teaching of Moses and the Pro- 
phets. No wonder he despised them. 
Most readers would probably apprehend 



TARSUS 19 

his meaning if his language were para- 
phrased into, " The sophistry of this 
age is foolishness with God ; n we may- 
add, " and with men too." 

V. In an age when the Jews had nearly 
lost all practical belief in a future life, 
and most of the Gentiles had lost it 
altogether, St. Paul wrote those words 
which have done more than the writings 
of all the other Apostles to bring men 
under the powers of the world to come. 
What qualified him to do that ? 

Several circumstances. Among them 
not the least was his birth in Tarsus. 
There he had become familiar with a me- 
morial which made him understand what 
comes to communities when they lose 
faith in a future life. 

A few miles from the city was the vil- 
lage of Anchiale. Tafel traced its foun- 
dation to the Sybarite king Sardanapalus, 
the Asshurbanipal of history. Here was 
a tomb supposed to be that of the As- 



20 CITIES OF PAUL 

Syrian monarch. Over it stood a colos- 
sal stone statue snapping its fingers 
toward heaven, and bearing in Assyrian 
letters the inscription : 

" Sardanapalus the son of Anacyn- 
daraxes built in one day Anchiale and 
Tarsus. Eat, drink, and be merry. No- 
thing else is worth that (a finger snap) ! w 

We need search no farther for the 
origin of the quotation cc Let us eat and 
drink, for to-morrow we die," or for 
the horror with which the Apostle repu- 
diates that creed. In Tarsus he had seen 
whither it leads. 

VI. iEgae was another village near 
Tarsus. Here was a famous temple of 
iEsculapius, doubtless, like others of its 
kind, furnished with dexterous devices 
for counterfeiting miracles. I have no 
question that here Paul gained the 
knowledge of jugglers' tricks which en- 
abled him at a glance to see through the 
pretensions of Elymas. 



TARSUS 21 

VII. Two other important facts may 
now be mentioned. 

I pass the circumstance that Tarsus 
was the emporium for the Cilician goat's- 
hair tents, which it was the Apostle's 
trade to make, with this remark. One 
can scarcely doubt that the loveliest and 
most comforting illustration regarding 
death he ever used occurred to him 
while working at his craft. Was it not 
the goat-skins on his knees, as he sewed 
them together and reflected upon the 
use for which his hands were preparing 
them, and thought how soon they would 
wear out, that moved him to write, 
" We know that if our earthly house of 
this tent were dissolved, we have a build- 
ing of God, an house not made with 
hands, eternal in the heavens." 

But all readers of the New Testament 
are aware of St. Paul's familiarity with 
commerce and ships. 

Tarsus was an ancient Chicago. Her 



22 CITIES OF PAUL 

coins represent her as a woman seated 
among bales of merchandise. At the 
mouth of the Cydnus, twelve miles away, 
was the largest navy yard in the world. 
There, too, was the chief rendezvous, 
with the possible exception of Alexandria, 
of the Roman mercantile marine. Here 
were the shipyards to which galleys, 
men-of-war, and merchantmen — a ma- 
jority of which had been built of the 
timber from forests close by — returned 
for repairs. The place was a Wool- 
wich, a Liverpool, and one is tempted 
to add a Greenwich all in one. It was 
the pride of Tarsus. It is difficult to 
doubt that here in his boyhood Paul 
gained the familiarity with maritime 
affairs which made him at home on ship- 
board, and became conspicuous on the 
disastrous voyage to Puteoli. On that 
voyage, it will be remembered, his judg- 
ment was several times diametrically op- 
posed to that of professional seamen, 



TARSUS 23 

and was in every instance proved to be 
correct. 

It seems as if the " Divinity that 
shapes our ends " had decreed that a man 
should be prepared to become the chief 
Apostle to the Gentiles. Therefore his 
youth must be spent where he will be- 
come familiar with all their ways. 

He shall stand before kings, there- 
fore he must be born and bred in a so- 
cial sphere that is not easily dazzled by 
the purple. 

He shall win a hearing from those 
who care for nothing but amusement, 
therefore his boyhood must be spent 
where an intimate acquaintance with 
their favorite amusements will enable 
him to clothe his message in illustrations 
that cannot fail to arrest their attention 
and arouse their interest. 

He shall confound the rhetoricians 
who have persuaded a bewildered age to 
mistake them for logicians, therefore 



24 CITIES OF PAUL 

he must be placed where a perfect under- 
standing of their sophistries shall come 
to him as an inheritance. 

He shall teach two years at Ephesus, 
therefore he must understand the ways 
of politicians. 

He shall spend much time closeted with 
soldiers, therefore, for his own comfort, 
he must in boyhood learn to love them. 

He shall make many a voyage, and a 
knowledge of the sea is for him impera- 
tive, therefore he must be cradled among 
ships. 

He must understand the chief indus- 
tries of men, therefore in childhood he 
shall play among bales of merchandise. 

He shall be the world's most potent 
preacher of the resurrection, therefore 
the most impressive picture on his primer 
shall be an illustration of what it means 
to lose faith in immortality. 

For all these reasons he must be born 
at Tarsus. 



II 

EPHESUS 

THE CITY OF SUPERSTITIONS 

Beautiful for situation ; the metropolis 
and chief commercial mart of the pro- 
vince of Asia; preeminent in the Orient 
for the splendor of her buildings ; wor- 
shiping in a temple which was counted 
the most wonderful of the world's seven 
wonders, and to which troubled souls 
from Spain to India made pilgrimages 
to atone for their transgressions or sent 
for amulets to charm away their sorrow; 
mother of the church which inaugurated 
the worship of the Virgin and placed the 
Madonna of Christianity upon the throne 
which for centuries the Madonna of pa- 
gans had occupied ; cradle of Parrhasius, 
residence of Zeuxis, and home of Apelles, 
the greatest painter who ever lived; a 



26 CITIES OF PAUL 

school of art which had no equal and but 
one superior in the ancient world ; birth- 
place of two of the most commanding 
intellectual conceptions yet given to man- 
kind, for here was formulated that doc- 
trine of " The Word " which dominates 
Christian creeds, and here Heracleitus 
announced the truth which, rediscovered 
by Charles Darwin, steers the science of 
to-day ; city in which Antony, " drunk 
with the caresses " of Cleopatra, cc madly 
flung a world away/' and in which Julian 
was led by juggling priests to waste a 
noble life in vain attempts to restore the 
ruined shrines of Olympus ; the city 
where Paul wrote that letter to Corinth 
which is still the manual of Christian 
churches ; home where Luke, " the be- 
loved physician," spent his declining 
years, and John founded the first semi- 
nary for the training of young men " be- 
cause they were strong ; ,: burial place, 
almost certainly, of that disciple " whom 



EPHESUS 27 

Jesus loved/' as also of Luke and Tim- 
othy and probably of the Virgin Mary ; 
memorable for giving name to that 
Pauline epistle pronounced by Cole- 
ridge to be " the divinest composition of 
man ; " arena where the great Apostle 
" fought with wild beasts/' and where in 
later years bishops and deacons in "the 
Robber Council" trampled each other 
in the name of Christ with a malignity 
wild beasts are incapable of feeling ; — 
Ephesus, called by the whole Ionic race, 
as London was called by Englishmen, 
"The Good Old City" and named by 
Pliny " The Eye of Asia/' well deserves 
attention. 

More than to its material advantages, 
great as they were, its magnificence was 
due to the superstition which atmos- 
phered its site with the same kind of 
reverence that Christians feel for Beth- 
lehem. Ephesus was founded and fos- 
tered by the superstition of pagans. It 



28 CITIES OF PAUL 

was long the world's chief nursery of 
those magical arts which superstition 
engenders. Its heart, the temple of 
Diana, was destroyed and the temple's 
foundations allowed to sink out of hu- 
man sight and memory by the supersti- 
tion of Christians. In view of these 
facts, it seems significant that whether 
the Epistle to the Ephesians was origi- 
nally addressed to those whose name it 
bears or not, it may be described cor- 
rectly as the inspired antidote to super- 
stition. For the controlling purpose of 
the epistle is to show the futility in 
religion of everything but affectionate 
obedience to God, while superstition 
consists solely in reliance upon some- 
thing other than such obedience. It is 
also significant that superstition is the 
danger against which the letter addressed 
to the church at Ephesus and preserved 
in the Apocalypse warns its readers. " I 
know thy works, . . . but I have this 



EPHESUS 29 

against thee, that thou didst leave thy 
first love." 

To continue religious activities after 
the love that inspired them has departed, 
to fast three times a week only to ap- 
pease a power one fears, is useless 
drudgery. It perverts Christianity into 
another of those superstitions it was 
commissioned to destroy, and ends by 
making the name of Christ a fetich as 
impotent as a silver shrine of Diana. 

I. Few landmarks remain to give a 
correct conception of the ancient city. 
The streams which fertilized her fields 
have shifted their channels. Her coast- 
line is changed. The canal which made 
her harbor the Liverpool of Asia — the 
province of that name — has long been 
silted up. Of the famous temple outside 
her walls not even the grave is marked. 
No mound swells over its ruins which 
are hidden beneath twenty feet of soil. 
When Mr. Wood began his excavation, 



30 CITIES OF PAUL 

the tobacco reserved for the sultan's use, 
the choicest raised in his dominions, 
grew above the streets where the people 
shouted in the ears of Paul " Great is 
Diana of the Ephesians ! " The city 
where John taught has vanished. Yet it 
is that city through which I shall try to 
lead you. 

Two rather steep hills, separated by 
a narrow valley : One of them, a ridge 
about thirteen hundred feet high, ran 
nearly east and west. From its shape and 
presumably also from the indentations 
which probably serrated its crest before 
they were leveled to accommodate a gar- 
rison, it was named " Prion," that is, the 
" Saw." The other hill, a little higher 
than Prion and north of its east end, was 
named " Coressus," or cc Lady's Hill." 

Tradition said that once when Diana 
lost her way, as the skillfulest hunters 
sometimes do, she ascended this ele- 
vation and inquired, (f Whose place is 



EPHESUS 31 

this ? " whereupon some sharp-witted 
Raleigh replied, " Coressus," which 
meant, as nearly as one can get it into 
English, "Thine, my Lady!" Hence 
the name. 

A line drawn from the north base of 
Lady's Hill to the west base of " The 
Saw " would form the hypothenuse of a 
right triangle. 1 In the space inclosed by 
it was the great basin which formed the 
inner harbor of the city. This was sup- 
plied by water from the sea, which is now 
more than four miles distant, by a canal, 
partly natural, partly artificial, and easily 
navigable for the largest vessels then 

1 These are Mr. Wood's identifications. Others, 
as Faulkner, call Mr. Wood's " Prion' * "Cores- 
sus," and his "Coressus" "Prion." In spite of 
Professor Ramsay's great authority, I believe Mr. 
Wood's identifications to be correct, because they 
harmonize best with known facts. The Austrian dis- 
coveries have not yet been published, but I do not 
see how they can affect this conclusion. In reading 
Faulkner or Professor Ramsay one must substitute 
" Prion " for Wood's " Coressus " and vice versa. 



32 CITIES OF PAUL 

afloat, until it was silted up through 
the miscalculation of an engineer whose 
blunder helped to ossify this main artery 
of commerce and so to make the city 
perish of gangrene. 

Around the east front of this basin, 
— which is to-day a reedy marsh, — the 
most important buildings clustered. The 
north side of Mt. Prion and the west 
and north of Coressus, terraced to their 
tops, were occupied by residences. 

The walls circling along Mt. Prion, 
a little south of its crest and around the 
east and north base of Coressus, have 
been traced from a point on the south 
side of the canal west of the Great Basin 
to a point on the north side of the basin. 
They were more than ten feet thick ; 
some thirty-six thousand feet in extent ; 
were strengthened at intervals of a hun- 
dred feet by towers forty feet square, with 
sally ports between them, and inclosed 
about a thousand acres. 



EPHESUS 33 

The city abounded in buildings which 
for strength and splendor and all but 
size equaled any and surpassed most of 
those in Rome itself. The population ex- 
tended far beyond the walls. This bird's- 
eye view will enable the reader to locate 
the few places to which I shall call his 
attention. 

West of Lady's Hill, between it and 
the basin, was the Great -Forum, and close 
to it the school of Tyrannus, in which 
Paul taught. Opening toward this Fo- 
rum and hewn into the base of Lady's 
Hill, was the great theatre. It was faced 
throughout with white marble, and seated 
nearly twenty-five thousand. It was used 
not only for spectacular displays but for 
religious and political assemblies, and 
seems to have served also as a bourse or 
meeting-place for the Board of Trade. 
Municipal decrees were inscribed upon 
the panels of its enormous stage. Many 
of these the spade has brought to light. 



34 CITIES OF PAUL 

Here it was that the populace rejected 
Paul and chose Demetrius for pilot. 

The east side of Lady's Hill (Co- 
ressus) appears to have been a cemetery. 
Here, nearly opposite the great theatre, 
but somewhat north of it and higher on 
the incline, was the cave in which, as the 
legend ran, the seven sleepers enjoyed 
their long repose. It was a cleft in the 
hill artificially wrought — it is not known 
when — into a sort of temple. Mark this 
spot, for there is reason to suspect that 
something of world-wide interest, to be 
considered presently, occurred there. 

At its east end, where the valley be- 
tween the Saw and Lady's Hill broadens 
toward the plain, the discovery of a tomb, 
with the cross, the nimbus-crowned hu- 
man figure, and the symbolic ox, lends 
help to the tradition that Luke was 
buried here. From the great theatre an 
avenue ran eastward between the Saw 
(Prion) and Lady's Hill (Coressus), 



EPHESUS 35 

curved around the latter to the north, 
and passing through the Magnesian Gate 
continued north-northwest to the Temple 
of Diana, a mile beyond. Until the last 
quarter of the nineteenth century that 
stupendous structure was supposed by 
modern scholars to have stood within 
the city walls. Mr. Wood, after search- 
ing six years in vain for its location, 
discovered in the great theatre an in- 
scription which showed him where to 
look, and digging twenty feet below a 
field of barley he found the true site. 

The avenue between the Magnesian 
Gate and the temple deserves attention. 
The gate itself, the only one of the six 
superb entrances to the city which con- 
cerns us, was a magnificent structure. It 
was flanked with strong towers, and 
offered two broad openings for vehi- 
cles, with one for pedestrians between 
them. Above these, I cannot tell pre- 
cisely where, was carved in high relief 



36 CITIES OF PAUL 

the figure of Nemesis, with wings and 
wheels to indicate that she was equally 
at home on earth and in air. Beneath, 
the name of Vespasian in due time ap- 
peared. 

From this gate two chariot-ways, sep- 
arated by a footway, led to the temple. 
The footway was covered by a decorated 
roof resting on marble pillars. Both 
sides of the avenue were lined with 
statues carved by Greek sculptors, tab- 
lets dedicated to renowned Ephesians, 
and tombs in which it seems terra-cotta 
lamps were kept burning day and night. 
Conspicuous among these was the co- 
lossal bronze representing Androclus, 
the mythical William Tell of Ephesus, 
as an armed warrior holding, I believe but 
am not sure, a torch in place of a spear. 

The avenue seems to have been not 
only a thoroughfare, but to have had 
playgrounds for children, and it touches 
a tender chord to find, in digging to its 



EPHESUS 37 

level, marbles such as our boys play with 
and hairpins of gold, silver, bone, and 
cheap metal, dropped perhaps by girls 
who romped here two thousand years 
ago. 

The avenue terminated at the great 
temple built on the site of that which 
was burned on the night of Alexander's 
birth. It was the work of the same ar- 
chitect who designed Alexandria. The 
grandeur of his conceptions was revealed, 
not only in the Pharos of that city, but 
even more impressively in his request 
for permission to hew Mt. Athos into a 
statue of Alexander which should repre- 
sent him holding in his right hand a 
city large enough for ten thousand in- 
habitants and in his left a lake into 
which all the streams of the mountain 
should be gathered and poured — a 
perpetual cataract — into the iEgean. 
There is hopeless uncertainty about the 
artist's name. Strabo calls him Cheiro- 



38 CITIES OF PAUL 

crates ; Plutarch calls him Stasicrates ; 
another author calls him Deinocrates, 
and still another Chersiphron. No one 
knows which name to accept. It is sig- 
nificant of many things that if asked 
who destroyed the famous temple every 
schoolboy would reply, " Herostratos 
was that scamp/' x though no scholar 
living can tell who rebuilt it. That, too, 
in spite of the fact that because the in- 
cendiary fired the temple to make his 
name remembered by posterity, the city 
decreed that no one should speak his 
name under penalty of death. 

All men know that Cain was the first 
murderer. But who was the first physi- 
cian ? Let him who can reply. 

A glance at the temple revealed a forest 
of white marble columns surrounded by 
beautiful gardens. The shafts, each sixty 
feet in height and hewn from a single 
block, stood upon drums carved in high 
1 De Quincey. 



EPHESUS 39 

relief by the skillfulest Greek artists. 
The columns were the gifts of kings. 

The heart of this marble forest was 
the Shrine of Diana. In that shrine stood 
the image of the goddess in pure gold, 
and beside it, shaped into the semblance 
or rather the suggestion of a human 
figure, the meteor stone "which fell from 
heaven." 

But these were not the only treasures 
of the temple. It contained statues in 
gold and silver of Egyptian I sis, Phry- 
gian Cybele, Syrian Astarte, and the su- 
preme female deities of other nations, so 
that worshipers from far and near, find- 
ing within its precincts the objects they 
adored, were made to feel as a devout 
Roman Catholic feels before the shrine 
of the Madonna. The temple was also 
rich in works by Praxiteles and other 
sculptors inferior to him alone. It con- 
tained a gallery of paintings by Parrha- 
sius, Zeuxis, and Apelles. Here, among 



40. CITIES OF PAUL 

several other portraits of Alexander by 
the last-named artist, hung that one of 
which the story ran that when Alexan- 
der declared it was not like him, and 
Bucephalus neighed in recognition be- 
fore it, the painter told the monarch that 
his horse was a better judge of art than 
its master. This was the picture which 
moved the Ephesians to say, " There 
are two Alexanders, one invincible, be- 
gotten by Philip ; the other inimitable, 
created by Apelles. ,, 

The temple furnished not only a 
Lady's chapel to every pagan cult and 
a British museum of art, but a savings 
bank for the poor, a bank of deposit 
and discount for the rich, a mont de pi'ete 
or pawn shop for the shiftless, and an 
asylum sanctuary for criminals. No cul- 
prit could be legally arrested within bow- 
shot of its bounds. Here, too, was the 
merchant's principal board of trade. 

Thus every department of Ephesian 



EPHESUS 41 

life was so dominated by the Temple of 
Diana that we may say the atmosphere 
the Ephesians breathed was generated 
here. This fact should be kept in mind 
when we read the nineteenth chapter of 
Acts. 

II. Mr. Wood discovered in the great 
theatre an inscription which informs us 
that when the men who, " having seized 
Gaius and Aristarchus, Paul's compan- 
ions," " rushed into " that place, were 
boys, some of them may have dropped 
their marbles to run toward that same 
theatre after one of those processions 
which helped prepare the way for the 
victory of the peddler over the Apostle. 
It tells of a wealthy Roman gentleman 
named Salutarius who presented a num- 
ber of gold and silver images, each weigh- 
ing from three to seven pounds, which 
the city voted to Artemis. One of them 
represented Diana holding two stags ; 
another figured the city as a woman 



42 CITIES OF PAUL 

wearing a mural crown. The munici- 
pality decreed that on the 25th of May, 
the birthday of the goddess, these im- 
ages should be carried from the tem- 
ple to the theatre and exhibited there. 
This decree, the name of the donor, the 
value of his gift, and the route to be 
taken by the procession Mr. Wood found 
inscribed upon an inner wall. It seems 
probable that the ceremony formed an 
aeolian attachment to that held every year 
on the same date in honor of Diana. 
The only reason for supposing it was 
not is that the images were to enter the 
city by the Magnesian and leave it by 
the Coressian ; and the latter, it has been 
held, intended solely for pedestrians, 
must have been too narrow for the pas- 
sage of chariots and cars. This objection, 
however, disappears before the reported 
discovery by the Austrian explorers of a 
broad street leading through it from the 
basin to the temple. 



EPHEgUS 43 

If the images formed a part of the 
annual procession, its general appearance 
could scarcely have been widely different 
from the following. 

First comes a band of damsels clad 
in fawn skins, scattering flowers as they 
pass. Then priests in leopard skins, 
some preceding, some following a plat- 
form car drawn by white mules. On this 
the gifts of Salutarius are displayed. 
Next the car of the goddess, drawn by 
stags, and bearing, not the meteorite 
stone, but a golden image representing a 
woman with many breasts, gleaming with 
jewels, supported between two golden 
sceptres fastened to the floor of the car. 
Then follow musicians. After them a 
woman dressed as the divine huntress 
with bow and quiver. Then troops of 
animals, dogs, deer, lions, specimens led 
in leash of most beasts that hunt or are 
hunted. 

At the Magnesian Gate the pro- 



44 CITIES OF PAUL 

cession is met by young men of the 
city in holiday attire, and by them con- 
ducted along the south side of Lady's 
Hill to the theatre where the gifts of 
Salutarius are placed for inspection. The 
terraces on both sides of the street are 
crowded with spectators, any of whom 
would be greatly if not dangerously con- 
spicuous unless he wore pendant from 
his neck or fastened on his bosom a gold 
or silver emblem, a tiny temple, shrine, 
or image, to mark him as one of those 
ready to shout " Great is Diana of the 
Ephesians ! ,: These trinkets were the 
" shrines " for which Demetrius bulled 
the market when it had been seriously 
depressed by the preaching of Paul, 

Twenty-five thousand persons crowd 
the theatre to hear speeches praising the 
generosity of Salutarius. When these 
have been spoken, the crowd rushes to 
the temple to see the most accomplished 
female dancers in the world — the Elsslers 



EPHESUS 45 

and Taglionis of their day — perform, 
with clanging shields and flashing swords, 
the far-famed dance of the Amazons, 
which can be witnessed nowhere else. 
It seems likely that Demetrius selected 
for his attack on the Apostle some such 
occasion as this, as Cyril selected Lent 
for the assassination of Hypatia and 
Catherine a saint's day for the murder 
of Coligni. Demetrius was probably a 
large employer of labor. His was pre- 
sumably the chief manufactory of the 
images worn by the people. His trade had 
been damaged already, and was threat- 
ened with ruin by the new religion. 
Workingmen were alarmed by the fear 
of losing employment. Priests, the good 
ones, were excited by zeal for the honor 
of their deity ; the bad ones by anxiety 
for their trade. Unless this proclaimer 
of an " unknown God " " who dwelt not 
in temples, neither was worshiped with 
men's hands," can be suppressed, their 



46 CITIES OF PAUL 

pockets will be depleted and their influ- 
ence curtailed. 

Thus avarice joined with hunger and 
superstition to prepare powder for the 
explosion, and a festival may have sup- 
plied the spark. Some one whispers that 
there is an atheist about who has per- 
suaded many to blaspheme by denying 
the deity of Diana. Another adds that 
through his influence trade has fallen off 
and workingmen are being discharged. 
Another adds that the atheist is a miser- 
able Jew whom even his despised coun- 
trymen have driven as a miscreant from 
Jerusalem. The whispers multiply as 
whispers do. They grow into outcries. 
" Where is the atheist ? " " Bring him 
into the theatre ! " 

The mob, now furious, rushes thither. 
They will drag Paul, if they can find him, 
into the place where all can see him, sure 
that he will not leave it alive. " Some 
shout one thing, some another/' snarl- 



EPHESUS 47 

ing, howling, and foaming in a way the 
memory of which may have suggested 
the words, " I fought with wild beasts at 
Ephesus ! " 

III. On the east side of Lady's Hill, 
in an artificially enlarged cleft, are the 
signs of what seems to have been a 
temple, and in later times a church. It 
was the cave I have asked the reader to 
mark. Here, it was fabled, seven young 
men, brothers and Christians, con- 
demned to death during the persecution 
under Diocletian, fled for concealment. 
Miraculously protected, they fell asleep 
and slept two hundred years. On awak- 
ening they came forth and found the 
city converted to Christ. Thereupon 
after telling their story with great joy, 
they yielded up the ghost, and to com- 
memorate the wonder the cave was 
wrought into a Christian church. 

But something occurred at Ephesus 
— and though no one, I believe, has 



48 CITIES OF PAUL 

ventured to say precisely where, there 
are reasons for thinking it may have 
been here — more important than the 
fiction of the Seven Sleepers. 

The " cave " was sacred to Arcadian 
Artemis. 

While Julian, still a youth, was waver- 
ing between the claims of the religion in 
which he had been bred and those of 
the Greek cult it had superseded, he left 
Athens for a surreptitious conference with 
Maximus at Ephesus. Maximus was an 
aged philosopher celebrated for wisdom 
and also for powers deemed supernatural. 
He was said to possess a voice of such 
exquisite sweetness that no one could 
hear him speak without being fascinated, 
as Ulysses had been by the songs of the 
sirens. Many thought his words oracular. 
There are reasons which make it seem 
probable to me that it was to this " cave," 
furnished with all appliances of the 
juggler's art, that the old man brought 



EPHESUS 49 

the young Julian. Spectres of fire ap- 
peared in the darkness. They moved 
around him. Mysterious sounds reached 
his ears. A voice declared, "The gods 
have given you the soul of Alexander." 

Trembling with awe, the future em- 
peror made the sign of the Cross. In- 
stantly the spectres vanished and the 
sounds ceased. A moment followed of 
darkness and silence. Then the same 
voice was heard from afar saying, " That 
sign is impotent, but it marks a blas- 
phemer to whom the gods will not 
speak. " 

Then Julian fell upon his face and 
swore a great oath that he would replace 
the old gods upon their thrones or per- 
ish in the attempt. Faithfully he kept 
the oath, and it is to his lasting honor 
that he strove to accomplish it not by 
the arguments of force, but by the per- 
suasions of reason. When at last he was 
compelled to utter the confession which 



50 CITIES OF PAUL 

Swinburne has paraphrased in the mem- 
orable lines, — 

"Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean ! 
The world has grown grey with thy breath, 
We have drunken of things Lethean, 
And fed on the fulness of death," — 

no man could truthfully say that he 
had shed blood for the furtherance of 
his faith. The fiction of the Seven Sleep- 
ers started those fairy tales of the 
" Sleeping Beauty " and the like which 
have cultivated the imaginations and 
sweetened the tempers of our children ; 
but the waking vision of Julian in the 
cave — it may be where the fabled sleep- 
ers lay — helped to change for half a 
generation the official religion of the Ro- 
man Empire, to pervert into an enemy 
of Christianity one of the least unchrist- 
like of all the Caesars, and went far to 
confirm in him those misconceptions of 
duty which enabled him to count as a 
virtue his usurpation of imperial power. 



EPHESUS 51 

IV. But the saddest form of super- 
stition that ever raged in Ephesus was 
manifested there in the year of our Lord 
449. I do not refer to the worship of the 
Virgin Mother, which originated from 
the decree of a council held in that city 
a few years earlier. On the contrary, of 
all the dogmas which I disbelieve, that 
one which for centuries led men to see 
in Mary those divine qualities which 
theologians had made it impossible for 
them to see in the phantom they had 
substituted for her son, seems to me the 
sweetest, the tenderest, and the most 
beneficent. At a time when to most 
Christians the word " Christ " signified 
incarnate cruelty, the spirit of Christ 
under the name of his Mother softened 
the sorrows, kindled the aspirations, and 
when it could not extirpate restrained 
the wicked passions of untold millions. 
Far be it from me to brand as a pernicious 
superstition the faith which enabled 



52 CITIES OF PAUL 

Jacopone to chant the Stabat Mater in 
the ears of an age which was soon to see, 
on every highway of Europe, flagellants 
frenzied by fear and dying in despair 
from the self-inflicted scourgings by 
which they strove to appease the wrath 
of the inexorable phantom they had 
been taught to call cc Christ." 

The superstition which clothed Ephe- 
sus with infamy was the same which has 
done more than all others to delay the 
coming of the Kingdom. It was the 
superstition which sired the Inquisition, 
burned Huss, kindled the fires of Smith- 
field, and painted Europe many times 
with blood. It murdered Bruno and 
tried to murder Luther, gathered the 
fagots for Servetus, and cursed humanity 
with Philip the Second. It was the su- 
perstition which the prophets of Israel 
fought without ceasing, which Paul's 
energies were strained to destroy, against 
which Christ was never through with 



EPHESUS 53 

warning his disciples ; the superstition 
that creeds are more important than con- 
duct, and that to love God with all the 
heart and one's neighbor as one's self, 
is wholly insufficient for the salvation of 
the soul that holds erroneous opinions. 
In 449 a. d., the churches from Rome to 
Antioch and from Alexandria to Con- 
stantinople were fiercely excited over a 
point of theological dogma. What that 
dogma meant no mortal understood then 
and no mortal understands now. There 
were certain party catchwords concerning 
the two natures of Christ. The words 
had been emptied of their meaning, if 
indeed they ever had any meaning, as 
completely as the word " Tory " or 
" Kingsman " has been emptied of the 
meaning it carried in America to the sol- 
diers of Washington. The words stood 
for no clear conception, but for a vacuum 
of conception. They became mere party 
war-cries. 



54 CITIES OF PAUL 

An Ecclesiastical Council, summoned 
by the emperor, convened at Ephesus. 
It was called to determine whether Eu- 
tyches, a teacher at Constantinople, used 
the orthodox war-cry. Dioscurus, Bishop 
of Alexandria, declared that he did. Fla- 
vian, Bishop of Constantinople, declared 
that he did not. One hundred and thirty- 
five, some say one hundred and fifty, 
bishops with their delegates assembled 
to try the case. Dioscurus, made presi- 
dent of the council, not by the vote of 
his peers, but by imperial decree, con- 
trolled an overwhelming majority of the 
members. The council met surrounded 
by soldiers who had been placed under 
his orders. Blank papers were given to 
the members of the council. These 
they were compelled at sword's edge to 
sign. Over the signatures thus obtained 
the opinion of the majority was written, 
and so the council speedily reached a 
" unanimous " decision. It was charged 



EPHESUS 55 

at the opening of proceedings that one 
of the bishops in conference had com- 
mitted an atrocious crime, for which he 
ought to be disqualified. Dioscurus, the 
president, replied, " If you have a com- 
plaint against his orthodoxy we will re- 
ceive it, but we are not here to pass 
judgment upon unchastity." Before the 
" unanimous " verdict was declared, the 
majority filled the air (it was in the Church 
of Madonna Mary) with loud and angry 
denunciations of the minority. When 
the verdict had been given, the Bishop 
of Alexandria, backed by a retinue of 
soldiers and a rabble of monks, shouting 
" He who would divide the nature of 
Christ should himself be cut in two ; 
kill them ! kill them ! ,: knocked down 
his brother the Bishop of Constantinople, 
trampled the breath out of his body, and 
mangled it so that in three days he died 
of his wounds. The delegate from Rome, 
who represented the great Leo, saved 



56 CITIES OF PAUL 

his life by flight, and the rest of the 
minority — some by lying, some by hid- 
ing in holes and cellars — escaped as best 
they could. 

All this occurred in the city to which 
every member of the council believed 
that Paul had written, " I therefore, the 
prisoner in the Lord, beseech you to 
walk worthily of the calling wherewith ye 
were called, with all lowliness and meek- 
ness, with longsuffering, forbearing one 
another in love." All this was done in 
the city where John had so often re- 
peated the Master's words, "A new 
commandment I give unto you, that ye 
love one another." All this was done in 
the city where, according to a tradition 
which every one of the council ought to 
have known, and most of them prob- 
ably did know, that same disciple had 
preached until, grown too feeble to walk, 
he was carried into his pulpit, and there 
repeated day after day the same words, 



EPHESUS 57 

adding no comment, "Little children, 
love one another," till wearied by the 
iteration his hearers asked him to say 
something more, and heard him reply, 
" No ! no ! Little children, there is 
nothing more ! " 



Ill 

PHILIPPI 

THE CITY OF THE SUICIDES 
" . . . Thou shalt meet me at Philippi." 

So, Shakespeare tells us, the spirit of 
Julius Caesar summoned Brutus from 
Asia to Macedonia. 

The scene is not a creation of the 
poet. To the minute details, — of place, 
tent near Sardis ; of time, past mid- 
night ; the solitude ; the sleeplessness ; 
the futile attempt to read ; the fading 
light, " how ill this taper burns," — it 
is copied from Plutarch. 

There is no valid reason for doubt- 
ing that amid precisely these circum- 
stances Brutus saw or thought he saw 
an apparition and heard or thought he 
heard it say, " I am thy evil genius. I 
will meet thee at Philippi." There is no 



PHILIPPI 59 

doubt whatever that he went to Philippi, 
and that there, by his defeat and death, 
changed the history of the world. 

Paul also, alone, in Asia, at night, 
saw a vision. A man of Macedonia ap- 
peared and said to him, " Come over 
into Macedonia and help us." 

The Apostle obeyed the summons, 
and at Philippi inaugurated a change still 
more important. But Philippi claims 
attention not only because there the 
"last of the Romans" ended and the 
" first of the Apostles " began their work 
in Europe ; at Philippi, it may be said, 
the civilized world was conquered three 
times and in three different ways. 

Without the phalanx Alexander could 
not have overcome the Orient. But it 
was the thousand talents taken yearly 
by his father from the mines of Philippi 
which created the phalanx. 

At Philippi forty-two years before 
Christ the battle was fought which de- 



60 CITIES OF PAUL 

cided that the Roman republic should 
be an empire. At Philippi it seems 
probable that Paul planted Christianity 
in Europe. For these reasons it seems 
scarcely an exaggeration to say that at 
Philippi deeds were done which have 
three times conquered the civilized world, 
— once by money, once by arms, and 
once by moral force. 

Only ruins, among which are traces 
of a theatre, cut in the solid rock of 
the hillside, and an ancient sarcophagus, 
which the peasants still believe to be the 
crib of Bucephalus, mark the site of 
the celebrated city, but it is possible, by 
combining hints from widely separated 
sources, to form a fairly accurate picture 
of the place. 

It was as purely as San Francisco a 
creation of gold mines. 

A certain mountain in Thrace was 
believed to be the favorite resort of 
Dionysus, the Greek Bacchus. Him, 



PHILIPPI 61 

the Thracian mountaineers chiefly wor- 
shiped. The mountain was also rich 
in gold, which most men chiefly worship. 
At the foot of the mountain was a min- 
ing camp, — one can scarcely say "a 
settlement," — named, from the abun- 
dance of waters near it, " The Springs." 

Philip, a more far-sighted statesman 
than his more celebrated son, discerned 
the capabilities of the location. First he 
renamed it after himself. There were sev- 
eral springs, and he meant to claim them 
all. Each of them was therefore named 
"Philip," and the whole of them "The 
Philips." Thus the city got the plural 
name Philippi, not because there were 
many Philips, but many streams bearing 
the same man's name. 

Next, in order to secure an adequate 
supply of laborers, he declared the place, 
because it was near the sacred mountain, 
a sanctuary. This soon made it a sort 
of Botany Bay, a refuge for criminals 



62 CITIES OF PAUL 

and fugitive slaves from all parts of 
Greece, for here the laws they had broken 
could not claim them. 

To keep such refuse at work, to pre- 
vent their cutting each other's throats and 
decamping with treasure, no less than to 
protect their operations from the fierce 
mountaineers, soldiers and fortifications 
were requisite. The astute monarch pro- 
vided both, and so arose Philippi, the 
treasury from which the gold that en- 
abled Alexander to conquer the world 
was drawn. 

We will visit the place in the year 
b. c. 42. 

Sailing westward across the iEgean 
Sea from near the site of Homer's Troy, 
we land at Neapolis, the port of Phil- 
ippi. Here close to the water runs the 
low range called, because it joins two 
lofty elevations, Symbalon, or the Link. 
It rises steeply. A mile and a half of 
the Egnation Road brings us to its sum- 



PHILIPPI 63 

mit. Sixteen hundred feet below us on 
the west lies a fertile plain rimmed with 
mountains. Upon it, nine miles to the 
northwest, stood the city. The Egna- 
tion Road, dividing it into unequal parts, 
formed its main street. The north and 
smaller section, triangular in shape, was 
built upon a rounded hill of solid rock 
and called " High Town." The south 
and larger section formed a square drawn 
on the base of the triangle, was on level 
ground, and was called " Low Town." 

In High Town stood the Citadel. It 
was of prodigious strength, and was prob- 
ably the prison from which an earth- 
quake delivered Paul. Both sections 
were inclosed by two concentric walls 
strengthened by towers and ramparts, 
and leaving between them a broad space 
filled with gardens and statues. Enter- 
ing the main street from the east by the 
Neapolitan Gate, where, more than a cen- 
tury later, Claudius placed his magnificent 



64 CITIES OF PAUL 

arch, we pass on the left a vast theatre, 
not built upon, but cut into the rocky hill. 
Walking the length of the main street and 
out through the " Spring Gate " or cc Gate 
of the Fountains " on the west, we pass, 
whether within or without both walls 
or between the two I am not sure, the 
" Aqueduct." Here the rivulets which 
gave name to the city were collected in 
a basin which supplied it with water, and 
discharged the surplus into the sinuous 
stream of the Gangas upon the banks of 
which Brutus cursed and Lydia prayed. 
The city was small. High Town and 
Low Town together included less than 
a mile north and south by half that dis- 
tance east and west. Long peace had 
made the walls seem needless, and the 
wealthy lived in suburbs which extended 
indefinitely south and east in a wilder- 
ness of lovely gardens adorned with 
statues and blooming with roses famed 
throughout the world for their beauty. 



PHILIPPI 65 

On the plain south of the city, amid 
marshes and rivulets which except for a 
small part of the year have long been 
dry, the battle that destroyed the last 
hope of the republic was fought. Here 
by his own hand died the cc noblest Ro- 
man of them all," with the curse upon 
his lips, cc May the gods avenge upon 
the enemies of Rome these multiplied 
misfortunes ! " 

cc We must fly ! " cried some one. 
" Yes," answered Brutus, " but not with 
our feet, with our hands," and fell upon 
his sword. 

Cassius had already killed himself; and 
an almost incredible number of nobles, 
some moved by patriotic despair, some 
by selfish fears, followed the example of 
these leaders. 

Ninety-four years had passed when 
Paul, summoned thither as Brutus had 
been by a vision or an apparition, entered 
Philippi. To understand his experiences 



66 CITIES OF PAUL 

there and the epistle written in view of 
them, one should keep in mind two 
facts. The first is that for some reason 
he felt more at home with the Philip- 
pian Christians than with those of other 
places ; wrote to them with less reserve, 
more as a pastor to his people or a 
father to his family. The second is that 
Philippi had become a military " Colo- 
nial Those born there had the rights 
of Roman citizenship. The cities en- 
joying that honor were few. There was 
probably no other in the world where 
it was prized so highly or guarded so 
jealously as here. When the magistrates 
learned that they had unwittingly tram- 
pled upon it, they were aware that they 
would probably be mobbed if the fact 
became known. This accounts for their 
terror and their eagerness to keep their 
blunder concealed when Paul, always 
alert to his surroundings and fully un- 
derstanding the dilemma in which they 



PHILIPPI 67 

had placed themselves, informed them 
who he was. 

There seem to have been few Jews in 
the city, perhaps not enough for a syna- 
gogue. The children of Abraham who 
lived there met for worship in a " porch ,s 
outside the walls, and probably upon 
the banks of the stream which drank 
the blood of Brutus. 

There is a suggestiveness in the fact 
that the first Christian convert at Phil- 
ippi appears to have been a woman. 

The original cult of the region was 
the worship of Dionysus. His minis- 
ters were priestesses. Wild-eyed, loose- 
haired, they danced and rushed to and 
fro in riotous orgies ; and these Baccha- 
nalian revels, led always by women be- 
lieved to be inspired by the Deity, formed 
one of the most diabolical features of 
paganism. That this cult survived in the 
time of Paul is indicated by the fact that 
one such woman, supposed to be pos- 



68 CITIES OF PAUL 

sessed by the god, a slave girl who by 
her " soothsaying brought much gain " 
to her owners, followed Paul about the 
streets declaring that he was the servant 
of the most High God. 

Ten or twelve years passed. The 
Apostle came to love the little church at 
Philippi as he loved no other. To it more 
than to others he looked for sympathy. 
It was the only one which never gave 
him cause to shed a tear. To it he wrote, 
and wrote amid circumstances which we 
should consider most depressing, the 
letter that may properly be called his 
"joy song," for none of his other writ- 
ings approaches it in gladness of heart. 

He is a prisoner at Rome. One can 
almost hear the clank of the chain bind- 
ing his right arm to the Pretorian as he 
draws it over the parchment in writing. 
And one can read between the lines re- 
miniscences of Philippi and revelations 
of Rome. 



PHILIPPI 69 

I. The battle of Philippi was natu- 
rally counted by Augustus the most 
important ever fought. It established 
the empire and gave him his throne. 
He therefore dignified the city with su- 
preme honors and carved his name upon 
its monuments. Claudius adorned it 
with a triumphal arch commemorating 
the same victory. The incidents of the 
battle must have been familiar to every 
one who walked its streets in the first 
century, for inscriptions at each turn 
brought them to mind. Plutarch wrote 
only what was matter of common report 
when he attributed to Brutus this dis- 
quisition, " When I was young, Cas- 
sius ... I blamed Cato for killing him- 
self, thinking it an irreligious act and 
not a valiant one among men to try to 
evade the divine course of things and 
not fearlessly to receive and undergo the 
evil that shall happen, but to run away 
from it. But now in my own fortunes I 



70 CITIES OF PAUL 

am of another mind ; for if Providence 
shall not dispose of what we now under- 
take according to our wishes, I resolve 
to put no further hopes or warlike pre- 
parations to the proof, but will die con- 
tented with my fortunes. For I have 
already given up my life to my country." 

Was there no remembrance of this 
when the Apostle wrote, " For me to live 
is Christ. ... I am in a strait betwixt 
two, having a desire to depart, and to be 
with Christ ; which is far better : never- 
theless to abide in the flesh is more need- 
ful for you." Therefore he will not 
imitate Brutus even in his wish to die. 

II. Once and once only Paul used the 
word erroneously translated in our re- 
ceived version " robbery." It is in the 
Epistle to the Philippians, and signifies 
"a thing to be snatched at." In less 
forceful but more dignified phrase the 
Revised Version renders it " a thing to 
be grasped." Christ thought equality 



PHILIPPI 71 

with God a thing not to be snatched at, 
but certified as his by humility and re- 
nunciation. 

Where else on earth could that de- 
scription appear so forceful as in the city 
where the most important and the most 
familiar event in its history had been a 
battle in which the four most powerful 
men in the world fought, each trying to 
" snatch ,: for himself universal sover- 
eignty ? Where else would the contrast 
between the ways of Christ and those 
of human ambition appear so conspicu- 
ous as in the city where the victory of 
Caesar over Brutus was blazoned upon 
arches, inscribed upon the stage of the 
theatre, carved upon the Citadel, and kept 
constantly in mind by the divine honors 
which had been instituted to Octavius 
and continued to his successors ? 

III. Paul, remember, was at Rome. 
He was constantly in the company — 
for a considerable time at least — of one 



72 CITIES OF PAUL 

of the Pretorian Guards. They were 
coarse men. Their vocation kept them 
near the emperor. They were idle and 
indolent and familiar with all the scan- 
dals of the palace. He must have heard 
their gossip. Indeed he implies that he 
did by the knowledge he shows of what 
was going on among them. I dare only 
hint at the foulness with which they 
reeked. Nero was emperor and Nero 
was their favorite. That is enough to 
say. They must have chattered about 
what they saw and heard. There was 
nothing else for them to talk of. Con- 
versations like this must have occurred 
in Paul's hearing, for if his friends were 
allowed to visit him, there can be little 
doubt that at a time when the Pretorians 
were emperor-makers and enjoyed bound- 
less license, no one of them would have 
submitted to the prohibition of visits 
from his cronies. 

" Yesterday all Rome was at the the- 



PHILIPPI 73 

aire," I fancy one of them saying. " Lady 
Blank had on a purple gown. When the 
emperor saw it he flew into a fury, sent 
three of us to tear off her clothes. We 
did it, too, and she had to go home naked 
as she was born." " That 's nothing," ex- 
claims another; "his brother sang a song 
at court, and sang it so well that Nero, 
who sings like a frog and thinks him- 
self a nightingale, went crazy with envy 
and told the old witch Locusta to poison 
him at dinner. She tried to, but it did n't 
work. So Nero pounded her black and 
blue till she promised to try again. He 
would n't trust her alone, and made her 
try her poison on some pigs. It killed 
them in a flash. So he got his brother 
to dinner and fed him on the devil's mix- 
ture. That ended him, and yesterday 
Locusta was made a duchess by the old 
boy for doing it — the old hag ! " 

If I should describe the half of what 
was going on in the palace and among 



74 CITIES OF PAUL 

the Pretorians around him, these words 
written by the Apostle to his beloved 
Philippians would seem the gasping of 
one in a sewer, smothering for fresh air. 
"Brethren, whatsoever things are true, 
whatsoever things are honorable, what- 
soever things are just, whatsoever things 
are pure, . . . whatsoever things are of 
good report ; if there be any virtue, if 
there be any praise, think on these 
things." 

IV. There is a coincidence which may 
be mentioned by way of introduction to 
a more important matter, as it may pos- 
sibly have occurred to the Apostle. 

Two women of the church at Philippi, 
Euodia and Syntyche, were at odds, 
seriously so it seems, for Paul exhorts 
them to come to an agreement and " be- 
seeches" a friend to help them do so. 

We are somewhat at sea for accurate 
dates, but about this time the bitter ri- 
valry between two court ladies filled 



PHILIPPI 75 

Rome with scandal. Their names were 
Octavia and Poppaea. They were fight- 
ing each other for the affections of Nero. 
The peculiarities of that emperor were 
such that in this contest Octavia was 
hopelessly handicapped by the fact that 
she was his wife. He therefore had her 
murdered in a particularly gruesome way, 
and her untimely fate excited the com- 
passion of the city. The incident was 
an al fresco painting of the miniature 
squabble at Philippi. 

But there is another passage in the 
epistle which has perplexed commenta- 
tors. It is the sharp and sudden and 
apparently uncalled-for reference, in the 
opening of the third chapter, to the in- 
fluence of the Jews. Dr. A. C. McGif- 
fert (page 388 of " The Apostolic 
Age ") has stated the difficulties of the 
passage with great force and suggested a 
way of escape from them. 

It seems to me that they vanish at 



76 CITIES OF PAUL 

the name of Poppaea. That villain- 
ous woman, if she were not a Jewish 
proselyte, was certainly a partisan of the 
Jews. She was an intimate friend of a 
Jewish actor named Aliturius, <c much 
beloved by Nero/' says Josephus, and 
to her influence over the emperor that 
historian attributes the success of the 
mission upon which he was sent to 
Rome. If, as is probable, she was used 
by other Jews as she had been by Jose- 
phus and Aliturius, the fact explains, 
not only Paul's outbreak of indignation, 
but also some of the hostilities to Christ 
in Nero's " palace," referred to in the 
first chapter of the epistle. 

The walls of a building excavated in 
1857, which seems to have been a train- 
ing school for court pages, were found 
covered with rude pictures and inscrip- 
tions scratched upon them with nails or 
knives. Some of these express the im- 
patience of schoolboys with their tasks. 



PHILIPPI 77 

There is a sketch in outline of a donkey 
turning a mill, and beneath it the words : 
" Work, work, little donkey, as I have 
worked myself, and thou shalt be re- 
warded for it." 

There is another which illustrates the 
first chapter of Philippians. It is the 
rough outline of a man with an ass's head 
stretched upon a cross. Beside it stands 
a youth in the attitude of prayer, and 
beneath is written, "Alexaminos wor- 
ships his God." x 

Consider what your feelings would be 
in an atmosphere reeking with such 
contemptuous mockery of your Saviour, 
and then read Paul's words penned while 
he breathed it : — 

" Some indeed preach Christ even of 
envy and strife; and some also of good 
will : the one do it of love, knowing that 
I am set for the defence of the gospel : 
but the other proclaim Christ of faction, 
1 For these and other graffiti, see Lanciani. 



78 CITIES OF PAUL 

not sincerely, thinking to raise up afflic- 
tion for me in my bonds. What then ? 
only that in every way, whether in pre- 
tence or in truth, Christ is proclaimed ; 
and therein I rejoice, yea, and will re- 
joice. . . . Wherefore also God highly 
exalted him, and gave unto him the name 
which is above every name ; that at the 
name of Jesus every knee should bow, 
of things in heaven and things on earth 
and things under the earth, and that 
every tongue should confess that Jesus 
Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the 
Father." 



IV 
THESSALONICA 

THE CITY OF THE SUFFERERS 

If you lay your right hand palm down- 
ward on the table, the four fingers touch- 
ing each other and the extended thumb 
crooked upward at its second joint, the 
part between the wrist and the line 
formed by the tip of your thumb and 
the second joints of your fingers will 
serve for a map of the iEgean Sea, 

At the second joint of your little fin- 
ger were the Troy of Homer and the 
Troas of St. Paul. The north shore, 
formed by the corresponding joints of 
your three other fingers, was the coast 
of Thrace and Macedonia. Should your 
fingers here change from water into land, 
they would pass through those pro- 
vinces, and their nails would represent 



80 CITIES OF PAUL 

the Balkans, which bound Bulgaria on 
the south. 

Your thumb is the Thermaic Gulf, 
and the open space between it and your 
forefinger a peninsula which has been 
distinguished by the grave of Euripi- 
des, the cradle of Aristotle, the canal 
dug by Xerxes to get his scoundrels 
dry-shod into Greece, and by the largest 
and most splendid group of monasteries 
ever known. The peninsula is a comb 
with three teeth thrust southward into 
the sea. Each tooth is thirty miles long, 
and the eastern of the three terminates 
in Mt. Athos, the terror of sailors in 
ancient times. The seven thousand 
monks who occupy the territory it de- 
fends, though zealous worshipers of 
the Virgin, are so fearful of all other 
females that they will not allow a cow, 
a hen, or even a she-cat, much less a 
woman, to enter their domain. 

At the tip of your thumb was a city, 



THESSALONICA 81 

called from immemorial time on account 
of the Hot Springs near it, " Therma." 
It was the first European fortress occu- 
pied by Xerxes. In a later age it was 
renamed, to honor the half-sister of Alex- 
ander the Great, " Thessalonica." Like 
the triumphal arch which once adorned 
its eastern entrance, its introductory syl- 
lable has perished, so that it is known 
to-day as Salonica. 

A little outside the base of your thumb, 
in clear view from the upper streets of 
this city, rising nine thousand feet above 
the sea, stands Mt. Olympus. Its glit- 
tering dome of snow was the throne 
before which, in Homer's time, Jove 
gathered in council the deities of Greece. 
Dense forests at the mountain's base con- 
cealed the Pierian Spring, beside which 
the Muses were born and Orpheus first 
saw the light. 

Close to the southeast of Olympus, 
and also visible from Thessalonica, 



82 CITIES OF PAUL 

stands Mt. Ossa. The gorge between 
the two, named, either from the steep- 
ness of its sides or because it was made 
by a single stroke of Neptune's trident, 
"The Cut," or in Greek, "Tempe," is 
the most celebrated valley in the world. 
Here Orpheus practiced the melodies 
which drew the enraptured trees to fol- 
low him and opened the gates of death 
before him. Here Apollo made atone- 
ment for slaying the Python and plucked 
the branch which, planted beside the 
Castalian Spring, grew into the sacred 
laurel of Delphi. 

From Thessalonica, therefore, the 
Apostle who proclaimed another king 
than Caesar first saw the citadel of those 
shadowy deities who were to vanish 
before the unknown God he came to 
declare. 

I. Having located our city, let us 
enter it. St. Paul would not recognize 
it now. Scarcely more than the site on 



THESSALONICA 83 

which it stands remains unchanged. For 
a little distance from the gulf the ground 
slopes gently upward, then rises more 
abruptly. The ancient walls can still be 
traced. They were six miles in circuit, 
and were flanked with frequent towers. 
The north wall formed a horseshoe curv- 
ing to the north ; the south wall, in a line 
parallel to the water and almost touch- 
ing it, joined the calks of the shoe, which 
were defensive towers of great strength. 
A broad avenue running parallel to the 
water wall bisected the city. This avenue 
formed a part of that military highway, 
named the " Egnation," by which the 
Hellespont was joined to the Adriatic, 
and Thessalonica was the most precious 
pearl upon the strand. Just inside the 
western wall this main street was spanned 
by a triumphal arch, probably erected by 
Octavius, to commemorate the victory 
at Philippi. The arch has disappeared, 
but its foundations remain. They have 



84 CITIES OF PAUL 

been excavated, and the names of the city 
magistrates inscribed upon them bear 
the title " Politarch." In the Book of 
Acts the same title is given them. As 
that title has been found nowhere else 
in ancient literature or on ancient monu- 
ments, the coincidence attests the accu- 
racy of the author of the book. Two 
centuries after Paul a second arch was 
raised over the same street near the east 
wall, probably to honor Constantine's 
victory over the Sarmatians. Not far 
north of the spot upon which this arch 
was placed, it is in the highest degree 
probable that there stood in the days of 
the Apostle a small temple for the mys- 
terious worship of the Kabiri. What 
that worship was is not known. We can 
say, however, that the parents of Alex- 
ander the Great visited Samothrace to 
take part in its mysteries, much as in 
our time pilgrims go to Lourdes ; that 
those who did that were decorated with 



THESSALONICA 85 

a purple ribbon ; were believed to be 
secured against all dangers at sea and 
from certain perils on land ; that the 
penalty for revealing what they had seen 
in the mysteries was death ; and that 
there is good evidence for believing that 
the majestic structure erected in the reign 
of Trajan was built over the little tem- 
ple or shrine, which advertised to the 
eyes of St. Paul the existence of the cult. 
Trajan's Temple, copied from the Pan- 
theon, was an immense dome springing 
from the ground, and could be entered 
only by subterranean approaches, as 
neither door nor window broke its vast 
expanse save the one round opening at 
the top, through which the sunbeams fell 
and the smoke of sacrifice ascended. 

A line drawn due south from this 
structure would have bisected the rich 
and aristocratic quarter of the city. 
Here stood the Hippodrome, of which 
there will be matters of importance to re- 



86 CITIES OF PAUL 

port anon. It was an ellipse of immense 
size, much larger than the Coliseum, but 
more like the Flavian Amphitheatre than 
the Circus Maximus. A subterranean 
gallery similar to that through which the 
Roman emperors passed to their throne 
in the Coliseum connected it with the 
celebrated palace of Diocletian. 

Gardens as beautiful as those which 
encircled Athens in her prime and far 
more extensive surrounded the whole 
city except on the water front. 

II. For more than two millenniums, 
Thessalonica has been an important 
centre of influence, and is still the sec- 
ond city of European Turkey. During 
the period marked by the most venom- 
ous quarreling over creeds which has 
ever disgraced the Christian church, it 
never ceased to be called "the ortho- 
dox city," and for centuries was the 
Gibraltar of the Greek empire against 
northern barbarians. 



THESSALONICA 87 

The little company of Thessalonians 
won to Christ by the preaching of St. 
Paul were by some cause subjected to 
exceptional trials. Aware of this, the 
Apostle wrote them a letter to hearten 
them in their " much affliction/' He 
urged them to wait patiently for the 
Saviour. They thought he meant that 
Christ would soon appear in visible form 
and set them free by physical force. To 
correct that impression he sent them a 
second letter. 

These two epistles are the earliest 
writings in the New Testament. They 
have a special interest in our time for this 
reason : the church at Thessalonica was 
composed of " working " people. The 
letters contained the advice of an Apos- 
tle who was also a skilled workman to 
such of them as, driven by oppression 
or allured by baseless expectations, were 
starting toward the excesses of a mod- 
ern strike. 



88 CITIES OF PAUL 

In the first letter, moved probably by 
reports which had reached his ears, he 
had written, " We beseech you, breth- 
ren . . . that ye be ambitious to be 
quiet, and to do your own business, and 
to work with your own hands . . . that 
ye may walk honestly toward them that 
are without ; " that is, toward the gen- 
eral public. But as this advice appeared 
to have been ineffectual, he wrote in 
the second letter, " When we were with 
you, this we commanded you, that if 
any would not work, neither should he 
eat. For we hear that there are some 
which walk among you disorderly, work- 
ing not at all, but are busybodies." 
That is, " busybodies who do no busi- 
ness," which seems to be Greek both for 
certain types of " walking delegates ,: 
and for their counterparts in those cap- 
italists without capital who are called 
cc promoters." 

III. When St. Paul arrived at Thessa- 



THESSALONICA 89 

lonica, the struggle between Roman im- 
perialism and the visible church which 
ended when the decree of Constantine 
wrote the name of Christ upon the pagan 
Sunday had just begun. The imperial 
rescript banishing all Jews from Rome 
had been issued. The record of it by- 
Suetonius is one of the only two pas- 
sages in pagan literature containing the 
name of Christ, and Suetonius gets it 
wrong. " Claudius," he says, " banished 
from Rome all the Jews who were con- 
tinually making disturbances at the in- 
stigation of one Chrestos." 

Neither emperor nor historian ever 
learned to distinguish Christians from 
Jews. Both supposed Christ to be a 
political agitator alive in the year 52. 
Some of the exiles fled to Thessalonica. 
St. Paul was probably mistaken for one 
of them. Certainly the charge urged by 
Suetonius was raised against him there as 
it had been at Philippi, " These all do 



go CITIES OF PAUL 

contrary to the decrees of Caesar, saying 
that there is another king, one Jesus." 
So cried the Apostle's countrymen. To 
denounce liim and his companions as 
among those at whom the imperial decree 
was aimed would help to prove their 
own loyalty. Policy sharpened the spear 
which bigotry forged. The accusation 
and the impression it made upon the 
magistrates warned the Apostle that 
Christians would find in the Roman 
government itself, which had been their 
protector, their fiercest foe. The warn- 
ing was confirmed at Corinth. For there, 
while writing to the Thessalonians, he 
was the guest of a family exiled by 
Claudius. Their conversation must have 
helped him to perceive the approaching 
storm which a few years later burst in 
the appalling persecution of Nero. There 
was cause enough for those exhortations 
by which he strove to brace the suffer- 
ers of Thessalonica, not only against ex- 



THESSALONICA 91 

isting trials, but against the more fright- 
ful terrors of the future. 

If asked to prove the general need 
of the comfort wherewith he comforted 
them and its efficacy also, I would be- 
gin by exhibiting four photographs of 
scenes in their city. 

1. The first appeared a century be- 
fore St. Paul entered the home of Jason. 
It shows a gentleman forty-two years old 
in an upper chamber of one of the aristo- 
cratic dwellings of Thessalonica. He is 
surrounded by every luxury wealth can 
procure, for he is the guest of a rich and 
devoted adherent. He is tall, slender, 
graceful, and has the eye of an eagle. 
His face, still familiar to educated men, 
shows signs of prodigious mental powers. 
He is writing. He has finished a letter 
to his wife at Rome, another to his bro- 
ther, and is inditing a third to his most 
intimate friend. If we believe what he 
writes, and there is no reason for doubt- 



92 CITIES OF PAUL 

ing it, his eyes are blinded and his parch- 
ment blotted by tears. He pours out 
wailings which a spoiled child of twelve 
might well be ashamed to utter. The 
whining of Napoleon at St. Helena seems 
manly beside them. " If you saw me," 
he declares, " you would not see me, not 
even a trace of me, not a shadow, but the 
image of a breathing corpse. Would that 
before this you had seen me dead ! " 

" Why did I not kill myself? " he ex- 
claims again and again. 

He interrupts his self-accusations for 
not committing suicide only to upbraid 
the friends who had risked their lives for 
his sake. He reiterates that life has no 
joy left for him ; that he is without hope 
in the world ; that his grief is more than 
he can bear. He walks the floor, wrings 
his hands, breaks into sobs and outcries ; 
not only does this, but is not ashamed to 
say that he does it. For he too has, like 
the cheery host and hostess of St. Paul, 



THESSALONICA 93 

been banished from Rome. He has lost 
office and a part of his wealth, and the 
flattery of the populace. He is still 
lapped in luxury. He is among devoted 
friends, yet his despair is abject. 

This broken-hearted sufferer was the 
most cultivated man, the most brilliant 
genius then living. He had mastered 
all the philosophies of earth ; could write 
books telling us how to grow old grace- 
fully, and how to endure the ills of life 
serenely — books which are still text- 
books in our colleges. He was one of 
the two most celebrated orators who 
have ever lived, and he had the conso- 
lation of believing that he had saved his 
country from destruction. But though 
a master of all the world's knowledge 
and wisdom, he never learned the secret 
which strengthened St. Paul to " endure 
all things." 

You have recognized Marcus Tullius 
Cicero. 



94 CITIES OF PAUL 

2. The second picture is, I appre- 
hend, largely one of the imagination. It 
can scarcely be wholly so. There is in 
the Museum of Constantinople a bronze 
medal struck in the fourth century which 
needs to be accounted for. It bears the 
head of a common Roman soldier with 
the name " Demetrius/' x Moreover, 
something remarkable must have oc- 
curred to start the legends which per- 
petuate that soldier's memory, and to 
enthrone him rather than St. Paul as the 
patron saint of Thessalonica. But even 
were it wholly without foundation in fact, 
the tale of the Bollandists would repre- 
sent so vividly and so accurately scenes 
often witnessed by the early church as 
to make it worth repeating. 

Scene. The Amphitheatre of Thessa- 
lonica. 

Time. 303 a. d. 

1 Professor Ramsay holds that Demetrius is only 
a Christianized name of pagan Demeter. 



THESSALONICA 95 

The tiers are crowded. A private sol- 
dier stripped of his arms stands naked 
in the arena. His name is Demetrius. 
A ring of soldiers surrounds him. Each 
of them holds a spear pointed at his 
heart. A voice of command asks, " Will 
you curse Jesus Christ ?" 

To those far off it sounded like thun- 
der. To those who saw his face it seemed 
that an angel spoke to him. For at the 
name Jesus, to which every knee shall 
bow, he kneels and a glory flashes from 
his countenance, while he replies : — 

" Christ is Lord ! " 

The multitude gnash their teeth. The 
spears pierce his heart. But a great joy 
fills his soul. He knows little else, but 
he has the knowledge which strength- 
ened St. Paul to " endure all things." 

A few years passed and then — this 
is authentic history — whenever foes 
invaded the city, its citizens comforted 
one another with these words, "They 



96 CITIES OF PAUL 

cannot harm us, for Demetrius will pro- 
tect us." And when, as occurred four 
times to her, the city was captured, 
sacked, and burned, her streets re- 
sounded with this wail of despair, — 

" Woe ! Woe ! Repent ! Our sins have 
driven Demetrius from us." 

3. It is the year 324 a. d. The sov- 
ereignty of the world has been divided 
between two brothers-in-law. Constan- 
tine is ruler of the West, Licinius of the 
East. Constantine has bowed his knee 
to the name of Christ. Licinius hates 
the name with a dull, brutal, implacable 
malignity. The battle of Scutari has 
finally made Constantine sole emperor. 
Sparing the life of his rival, he has 
banished him to Thessalonica. Here, 
after ruling half the world for sixteen 
years, stripped of every dignity, impo- 
tent, friendless, without a follower, 
gnashing his teeth upon the Christians 
whom he dares not even insult, the de- 



THESSALONICA 97 

posed potentate gnawed his own heart 
till, crazed by despair, he made the futile 
clutch at power for which his life paid 
the penalty. 

4. The fourth picture represents a 
diamond of finest water set in black 
enamel. It cannot be photographed. 
The gem is too brilliant, the setting too 
dark for art to reproduce. This may be 
the reason why it is so little known, for 
the facts are uncontroverted. 

When Thessalonica had become an 
almost perfect specimen of all that a 
Christian community ought not to be, 
there appeared in it an almost perfect 
specimen of all that a Christian ought 
to be. 

History can show few sharper con- 
trasts than that between western and 
eastern Christendom during the twelfth 
century. It was more radical than that 
between either and those Mussulmans 
against whom both had joined hands 



98 CITIES OF PAUL 

but not hearts. Throughout western 
Europe the ideal of Christian manhood 
was a brutal prize fighter, who neither 
feared God nor regarded man, enslaved 
by a religion which made him tremble 
before an unseen being whom he called 
God, and whom the scriptures call the 
devil. The only virtue worshiped was 
physical courage. The only vice de- 
spised was physical cowardice. 

The Greeks, on the other hand, had 
become a congregation of cowards. They 
despised the courage of the Latins as 
stupid savagery ; considered deceit and 
treachery weapons which distinguished 
men from brutes, and though voluble in 
professions of loyalty to Christ, had no 
religion at all. The diplomacy of Rome 
was threats enforced by spears. The 
diplomacy of Constantinople was lies 
supplemented by poisoned wine and 
assassin's daggers. Thessalonica was a 
nest of debauched manikins, fighting 



THESSALONICA 99 

each other over trivial points of doctrine 
as angry apes contend for the straws in 
their cage. Her wealth was no less 
enormous than her profligacy. She was 
more depraved than even Constantino- 
ple, because her proximity to the West 
had kept smouldering in her heart a su- 
perstitious worship of Demetrius which 
made her in some degree conscious of 
her degradation, and put her in the class 
of those who know their Master's will 
and do it not. 

In 1 1 85, when Norman William II 
of Sicily besieged the city, Eustathius 
was its bishop. Though incomparably 
the most learned man of his time, his 
character eclipsed his learning. In a 
council convened by the Byzantine 
emperor for the sole purpose of en- 
forcing a treacherous and secret league 
with the Mussulmans against the west- 
ern Christians, he had single-handed 
thwarted the imperial purpose. In order 



ioo CITIES OF PAUL 

to nullify his influence, the emperor, 
with fury in his heart and flattery on 
his lips, sent him from court to the See 
of Thessalonica. There his sturdy hon- 
esty and the invincible skill with which 
he fought a nefarious municipal ring 
that had clutched the city's throat pro- 
voked an opposition which drove him 
into exile. No sooner had he left than 
the men who had driven him away be- 
gan to fight each other with a fury that 
threatened to make their city a sham- 
bles. To save it from suicide they sent a 
delegation who besought him on their 
knees to return. He instantly complied 
and his return brought peace. 

In religion his attacks upon supersti- 
tion and hypocrisy were equally effec- 
tive. His see included the monasteries 
of Athos. These were filled with lazy 
beggars, some of whom had entered 
them for loaves and fishes, some for 
the sake of being called " Rabbi." To 



THESSALONICA 101 

these he said, " You are hypocrites 
from head to foot." Others, and their 
name was legion, who were seeking to 
earn heaven by passing their lives on 
treetops, standing on pillars, coffining 
themselves in iron coats, or spending 
their days in caves where no ray of light 
could reach them, he treated more ten- 
derly. Though they were counted holy 
men, he said to them and of them, "Ye 
are deceivers of the people and rebels 
against God. Christ said his yoke was 
easy and his burden light, but ye dare 
to teach that his yoke is hard and his 
burden heavy. Christ told his disciples 
to go into the world and ye have fled 
out of the world." 

In this marvelous man, who has been 
too little remembered, were combined 
the devotion of St. Francis, the bravery 
of Huss, the energy of Luther, and the 
executive ability of Loyola. He was as 
far in advance of his age as Bruno was 



102 CITIES OF PAUL 

of his, but he enforced his opinions with 
a tact that not only saved him from 
martyrdom, but made them effective. 

When the Norman fleet approached, 
Eustathius strove in vain to make the 
people appreciate their danger. They 
would not lift a finger for defense. They 
seemed to despise the Franks more than 
they hated them. There was also, it is 
probable, some sincerity in their answer 
to the bishop's exhortations, " Deme- 
trius will sink their ships." 

The bishop's reputation was such that 
before attacking the city the Franks sent 
word entreating him to leave the place 
before they wreaked upon it the ven- 
geance its sins had provoked from out- 
raged Deity, because if by any accident 
he should be slain in the assault " the 
light of the world would be put out." 

His reply was of course that the shep- 
herd must not fly when the wolves ap- 
proach. 



THESSALONICA 103 

The massacre which ensued ranks 
among the unique and conspicuous hor- 
rors of history. 

The coward Greeks attempted no 
resistance. Instead of defending their 
strong walls, they rushed into their 
churches shrieking prayers to Demetrius 
or increasing the panic by their cries 
" Woe ! woe ! Demetrius has forsaken 
us ! " 

The Norman soldiers spared neither 
sex nor age. There have been few 
manifestations of the devilishness of reli- 
gious animosities equal to the following. 
Franks and Greeks each counted the 
other heretics. The Greek Church de- 
clared itself the true New Jerusalem. 
The Franks mocked that claim. To 
ridicule it, probably informed by their 
priests of the words in the Apocalypse 
"without are dogs and sorcerers," the 
soldiers gathered around the churches 
in which the quaking fugitives were 



104 CITIES OF PAUL 

supplicating the God in whose name 
these same soldiers were fighting ; stood 
for a while in mocking irony barking 
like dogs, then rushed in and slaugh- 
tered the suppliants before their altars. 

During these horrors, Eustathius, com- 
manding, entreating, catching arms up- 
lifted to strike, throwing himself as a 
shield before the defenseless, seemed 
almost omnipresent ; and though the 
death work lasted three hours, no acci- 
dent harmed him, and when the mur- 
derers paused to breathe, his eloquence 
moved their leaders to stop the mas- 
sacre and accept a ransom for the city. 

IV. The lamentations of Cicero, the 
triumph of Demetrius, the despair of 
Licinius, and the heroism of Eustathius 
illustrate the universal need of guidance 
to that source of strength to which St. 
Paul pointed eight times in his two short 
letters to the Thessalonians. But they 
are, among the facts which justify the title 



THESSALONICA 105 

of this paper, as drops in a gallon of 
misery. 

During four centuries Thessalonica 
was the main bulwark of the Byzantine 
Empire in Saracenic, Gothic, and Scla- 
vonic wars. Almost constantly under fire, 
she bore the brunt of those invasions. 
She was captured, pillaged, burned, by 
Egyptians, Latins, Turks. Twice she 
was razed almost to the ground. Yet 
after every devastation she revived as 
a plant in spring. When in 904 A. d., 
after sacking and burning her, the Arabs 
of the Nile carried twenty-two thousand 
of her choicest youths and maidens into 
slavery, it seemed that she must cease to 
be. But though cast down she was not 
destroyed, and two centuries later she 
appeared as rich and beautiful as ever. 

Her most widely known tribulation 
affords a signal illustration of the fact 
that the Power in whom Paul trusted to 
bring good out of evil sometimes sends 



106 CITIES OF PAUL 

his best blessings by the hands of sor- 
row. 

Thessalonica had been the favorite 
residence of the Emperor Theodosius. 
Four years he had held it against the 
repeated assaults of the Ostrogoths, and 
even after assuming the purple he was 
loath to leave the place. Here he united 
with the church. In the winter of 370 
an illness brought him to the door of 
death. Though a Christian by inherit- 
ance and conviction, he had not been 
baptized, but now he asked and received 
baptism into the name of Him who 
came, not to destroy men's lives, but to 
save them. Mark how he fulfilled his 
vows. 

Chariot racing was becoming the fa- 
vorite sport of the Greek cities. It had 
not yet reached the popularity it attained 
in the time of Justinian, when the colors 
worn by rival charioteers became badges 
dividing into rancorous factions, not 



THESSALONICA 107 

only the betting rings, but the state and 
the church. Beginning in the circus, it 
finally severed families, ruptured the 
court, rent the church. In the conflicts 
between the two parties, civilians, sol- 
diers, emperors, bishops, took part with 
furious passion. Fathers fought their 
sons, sons slew their fathers, and women 
with weapons in their hands battled on 
one side or the other. No man dreamed 
of winning office in either church or state 
without the support of one of these fac- 
tions. 

When Justinian was crowned, the 
Greens were believed to favor the cause 
of his predecessor. The Blues, there- 
fore, espoused that of the new emperor. 
Moved by gratitude or fear, he allowed 
them a license compared with which the 
most odious excesses of modern political 
thugs seem virtuous. Men wearing the 
blue ribbon rioted, robbed, murdered, 
and set fire to houses with impunity. 



io8 CITIES OF PAUL 

Five years that state of things continued. 
It ended in an insurrection which nearly 
cost Justinian his throne and his life, 
and was not suppressed until the palace, 
with a large part of the capital, lay in 
ashes and thirty thousand citizens had 
been slain by Belisarius. 

This silly and fatal fashion had seized 
Thessalonica when in 390 her favorite 
charioteer committed a pestilential crime. 
Botheric, the imperial general in com- 
mand of the garrison, imprisoned the 
culprit. The populace clamored for his 
release. To them the most disgusting 
crimes seemed trifles compared with the 
loss of a race to a rival city. The im- 
prisonment of their favorite might mean 
that. Botheric refused to release the 
criminal. The race day arrived. The 
people assembled. Their favorite did 
not appear. In sudden fury they as- 
saulted the garrison, which was small, 
slew the general, with several of his sol- 



THESSALONICA 109 

diers, and dragged their mutilated bodies 
through the streets. 

The emperor was in Italy. The report 
of the outrage goaded him to madness. 
He determined to retaliate without 
form of law. By his orders the inhab- 
itants of Thessalonica were invited in 
the emperor's name to another race in 
which it is probable they were given 
to understand that their favorite would 
reappear. They crowded the Hippo- 
drome. Old men and young, women 
and children, rich and poor, packed the 
tiers of the immense inclosure. But they 
saw no chariots. While they waited the 
gates were shut. A flourish of trum- 
pets. The spectators leaned forward at 
the signal, expecting to see their favorite. 
A very different sight met their view. 
Archers and spearsmen who had been 
concealed beneath the tiers marched into 
the arena. Shooting their arrows and 
hurling their spears into the dense masses 



no CITIES OF PAUL 

of spectators, they began an indiscrimi- 
nate massacre. They had been ordered 
to spare no one. They obeyed their 
orders. For more than three hours the 
slaughter continued. Foreigners and 
visitors were cut down with the rest. 

A wealthy merchant from abroad who 
was present with his two sons offered all 
his possession for the life of one of them. 
The offer was accepted. While the fa- 
ther deliberated which son he should 
save, the soldiers plunged their daggers 
into the hearts of both and then slew 
their parent. More than seven thou- 
sand — some authorities say fifteen — 
were slain. The guilt of the emperor 
who allowed and almost certainly planned 
the details of this horror was more atro- 
cious because Thessalonica had been his 
home, the victims of his vengeance had 
been his neighbors and his friends. Yet 
perhaps no single act since the Cruci- 
fixion has been overruled to the accom- 



THESSALONICA in 

plishment of so much good by impress- 
ing upon the world the spirit of Christ 
as this diabolical crime. 

For this deed the world saw Caesar 
himself excommunicated, compelled to 
do eight months' penance, and even then 
refused the Sacrament until, stripped 
of every emblem of power, he had 
lain all night upon the stones before 
the altar of Milan Cathedral begging 
forgiveness from Him "who came to 
save men's lives." The sight of the 
"foremost man in all this world," the 
man who had power by a word to 
kill or to spare whom he would of a 
hundred million subjects, lying abject 
as the poorest beggar because he had 
broken a command of Christ, probably 
impressed upon mankind the meaning 
and the power of Christianity as they 
had never been felt before. It was the 
longest single leap toward true demo- 
cracy ever made. 



ii2 CITIES OF PAUL 

Those sufferers of Thessalonica did 
not die in vain. 

V. Thessalonica is still, as I have 
said, after the capital, the most impor- 
tant city of European Turkey. Many of 
her wealthiest citizens, though Moslems 
in faith, are of Jewish descent, and their 
history adds another to the mournful 
memories of their home. Their ances- 
tors were not the men who persecuted 
Paul, but were themselves victims of a 
persecution unique in its atrocity. 

In 1492, while Columbus was seek- 
ing a new world, a decree of Ferdinand 
and Isabella condemned to death all 
unbaptized Jews found after one hun- 
dred and twenty days in their domin- 
ions. For centuries Spain had been their 
home. They had created most of her 
wealth. One of them offered an enor- 
mous sum to relieve her finances, which 
were greatly embarrassed, if the monarchs 
would adopt milder measures. While 



THESSALONICA 113 

they hesitated between cupidity and what 
they deemed their duty, Torquemada 
entered their presence, and holding a 
crucifix before them exclaimed, "Judas 
sold his Master for thirty pieces of 
silver. Sell Him again for a higher price 
and give to God an account of your 
bargain." 

That decided the wavering sovereigns. 
The Jews were driven out. Robbed of 
all they possessed, they knew not whither 
to fly. Portugal was, if possible, more 
cruel than Spain. King Manuel's decree 
required all Jewish children under four 
years to be taken from their parents and 
placed under Christian training, while 
every Israelite above that age was driven 
from the kingdom. Mothers threw their 
offspring into the rivers or slew them 
with their own hands, to save them from 
what they thought eternal death. Do- 
minican preachers proclaimed that the 
pains of purgatory would be limited to 



ii4 CITIES OF PAUL 

a hundred days for every Christian who 
killed a Jew. 

Like their father from Ur, the de- 
spoiled victims of theological frenzy went 
forth not knowing whither they should 
go. But they were true to their faith. 
A shipload of the exiles, wrecked upon 
the Barbary coast, escaped starvation by 
eating the grass that grew wild upon the 
shore. Though suffering the pangs of 
hunger, they would not at first touch a 
blade because it was the Sabbath, and 
their law forbade the plucking of corn 
upon that day. But when their rabbi 
explained that there was no law against 
cropping as the beasts do, the ravenous 
zealots threw themselves upon their faces, 
and keeping their hands behind them, 
seized the green blades with their teeth. 

Many of the exiles perished. Many 
were enslaved at the ports where they 
sought refuge. A considerable number 
fled to Thessalonica. Here they were 



THESSALONICA 115 

treated with a humanity that met them 
nowhere else. Kind treatment in time 
melted away the zeal which persecution 
had intensified as icebergs are melted 
when they drift into tropic seas ; and 
the descendants of the Spanish refugees 
gradually adopted the faith of their bene- 
factors. 

Of all the cities mentioned in the New 
Testament, Thessalonica is the most 
striking illustration of the Master's 
words, " Blessed are they that mourn." 
No other of them all has suffered so 
much, yet she is the only one which 
holds to-day a position of relative im- 
portance equal to that she occupied when 
the words were spoken. 



OLD CORINTH 

THE CITY OF THE ATHLETES 

The Acropolis or Citadel of Athens was 
a quadrangular mass of rock rising a 
hundred and fifty feet sheer on every 
side except the west. The length of its 
leveled top, a thousand feet from east to 
west, measured twice the width. Midway 
upon the northern verge the Ectheum, 
a temple to Athena, presented the most 
faultless specimen of Ionic grace the 
world has seen. Directly opposite, upon 
the southern verge, and dedicated to the 
same divinity, the Parthenon embodied 
the supreme achievement of Doric art. 

Both buildings fronted the rising sun. 
The space between them was, as the 
whole of the Acropolis, covered thickly 
with statues so lovely that a torso or 



OLD CORINTH 117 

even an arm from one of them is counted 
a treasure in modern museums. 

Raised by a lofty pedestal above this 
forest of sculpture, midway between her 
two temples, and towering above them, 
seventy feet in height, cast by Phidias 
from the spoils of Marathon, facing west- 
ward to overlook the city that trusted in 
her care, armed with helmet, shield, and 
spear to protect its people, stood the 
bronze colossus of Athena, the goddess 
of the mind. 

Fifty-six miles to the west and plainly 
visible through the clear air of Greece, 
was the Acrocorinthus, or Citadel of 
Corinth. 

Upon its crest, dominating that city 
as Athena dominated Athens, stood the 
temple and statue of Aphrodite, the 
goddess of the body. 

The deity of Athens glancing scorn- 
fully at the deity of Corinth seemed to 
1 Wright's Ancient Cities y p. 155. 



n8 CITIES OF PAUL 

say, <c Seek first the powers of the intel- 
lect as my Athenians do, and all things 
needful shall be added unto you." 

The deity of Corinth, flashing back 
the scornful glance in sunny smiles, 
seemed to reply, " Seek first the plea- 
sures of the body — what ye shall eat 
and what ye shall drink and wherewithal 
ye shall be clothed — and all things 
needful shall be yours." 

Athens, loyal to her creed as the 
magnet to the pole, ended in midnight 
darkness, but left for her memorial a 
cluster of names, poets, philosophers, 
orators, and artists, unapproached for 
brilliancy in the annals of our race. 

Corinth, no less loyal to her creed, 
ended in ruin still more complete, and 
left as her legacy only a shameful night 
unstarred by the name of a poet or phi- 
losopher, scarcely of an artist or an ora- 
tor, bright enough to hold the attention 
of mankind; and — what Americans 



OLD CORINTH 119 

cannot afford to forget — though she 
was the wealthiest city of Greece, peo- 
pled by merchant princes more magnifi- 
cent than Tyre ever saw, the only one 
of her citizens whose name is still fami- 
liar was that penniless genius who had 
not where to lay his head, and yet when 
the emperor of the world asked him 
"What can I do for you?" was said 
to have replied, " You can get out of 
my sunlight." 

The histories of Athens and of Cor- 
inth declare that intellectual power and 
material prosperity are alike unable to 
preserve communities which do not 
obey the voice which said to them, as it 
said to Jerusalem, " Seek first right- 
eousness, and all things needful shall be 
added unto you." 

The fate of Athens I have traced in 
another paper. 1 The ruin of old Corinth 
was more sudden and complete. 
1 Ancient Cities. 



120 CITIES OF PAUL 

The Mediterranean, gnawing out from 
the west the long and narrow Gulf of 
Corinth, and from the southeast the 
broader and shorter Saronic Gulf, has 
nearly bitten Greece in two. Between 
these gulfs a bar of rock three miles thick 
holds its almost severed parts together. 
The slight vessels of antiquity, placed 
on frames with wooden rollers, were 
drawn across the narrow bar, and for this 
reason it was named "the place over 
which things go," or in Greek, " the 
isthmus." Nature marked the spot for 
a commercial centre. While commerce 
was confined almost wholly to the Medi- 
terranean, the " isthmus " was relatively 
more important than is Suez or Panama 
to-day. 

Eight miles west of its narrowest part 
the isthmus broadens to six miles. 
There stood Corinth. It was older than 
Sparta, older than Athens. To picture its 
appearance think of a heavily, puffily 



OLD CORINTH 121 

upholstered chair with a very high back, 
a very low seat, and no arms, so placed 
as to face a little east of north. The 
back is a huge crag, rising, not sheer 
but steep, more than eighteen hundred 
feet. The seat is a gently sloping mass 
of rock thrust from the crag two hun- 
dred feet above its base. Upon this seat 
the city rested, and its walls, includ- 
ing back of crag and seat of rock, were 
about ten miles in circuit. Upon the 
summit of the crag which formed the 
Acrocorinthus rested a dainty temple of 
Aphrodite. Near it, probably within the 
temple precincts, a spring of water named 
Peirene formed, with Siloa and Castalia, 
one of the three most celebrated foun- 
tains the world has known. The entire 
water supply of the city till the time of 
Hadrian came from this mountainous 
crag. Its waters were artificially con- 
ducted to three different reservoirs, each 
inclosed and roofed with marble, and 



122 CITIES OF PAUL 

probably bearing at one or another time 
the name "Peirene." Two of these 
have been located by Professor Rich- 
ardson. 

Hadrian supplied a fourth reservoir 
from a more distant source, and placed 
upon its brink a winged horse of bronze 
pouring the stream through an uplifted 
ivory hoof. The significance of this de- 
vice we shall presently consider. 

The entire crag or mountain was ter- 
raced and planted with trees and flowers, 
so that viewed from the north it re- 
sembled an immense bouquet, out of 
which peered statues in marble and 
bronze, marking the winding road that 
led to the temple on its summit. A 
broad way running north between mili- 
tary walls joined the city with Lechaeum, 
its harbor on the Corinthian Gulf; and a 
second spacious avenue to the southeast, 
bordered by pine groves, thick set with 
stately mausoleums and statues of the 



OLD CORINTH 123 

dead, conducted to Cenchreae, the harbor 
on the Saronic Gulf. Tombs of men 
honored in their day abounded here, but 
the only personalities which gave it a dis- 
tinction, still remembered, were two for- 
eigners, — the pauper Diogenes, already 
mentioned, who, though he drank water 
only, lived in an empty wine cask at one 
end of the avenue, and a workingman, a 
tent-maker, who passed some months at 
the other. 

The harbor of Cenchreae lay between 
two rocky promontories, each of which 
was crowned by a temple. A colossal 
bronze of the Greek Neptune, holding 
in one hand a trident and in the other 
a dolphin, rose from the water between 
them. At Cenchreae lived the lady Phoebe, 
who carried from Corinth the Epistle to 
the Romans. But what gave earliest and 
widest celebrity to Corinth remains to 
be told. 

We are sitting in the armless chair, 



124 CITIES OF PAUL 

facing nearly north, the Temple of Venus, 
like a finial ornament, high overhead. 
Extending the left hand a mile and a 
half before us, we dip our fingers at Le- 
chaeum in the Corinthian Gulf. Reach- 
ing the right arm seven miles southeast, 
we shake hands with Phoebe at Cen- 
chreae. Turn your head halfway to the 
right and note what is between your 
arms. 

From gulf to gulf, eight miles away, 
curves the boundary. It is a military 
wall built to keep Xerxes out of south- 
ern Greece, and called " The Isthmian." 
Just inside it is the great Temple of 
Neptune, and near the latter the build- 
ings used for the Isthmian games. The 
avenue leading to it is fringed on one 
side by a row of pine trees, on the other 
by a row of statues facing them. These 
grow longer every two years, for they 
are memorials of the victors in the bien- 
nial competitions. Next to having his 



OLD CORINTH 125 

statue placed at Olympia, the highest 
ambition of a Greek youth is to have it 
here. If he wins the prize at Olympia 
in running, boxing, wrestling, poetry, or 
music, his native city will proclaim a 
holiday to welcome him home. A breach 
will be made in its walls for him to enter, 
and when he has passed through it will 
be closed, that none less worthy may 
tread in his steps. Though he will hence- 
forth belong to the highest aristocracy 
of his country, his most valued reward 
will be the knowledge that his statue 
stands in the sacred grove of Olympia. 
Second only to this was the glory of the 
victor at Isthmia. 

The history of Corinth shows no less 
vividly than the history of Israel the 
efforts of the unseen powers to save a 
community from its peculiar dangers, 
and the appalling obstinacy with which 
those efforts mav be resisted. Before 
our Scriptures had been written Corinth 



126 CITIES OF PAUL 

received her bible. In form it was un- 
like ours ; in substance it was similar. 
How it was given, when or through 
whom, no one knows. But it was there, 
and it was adapted more accurately than 
our Bible to the needs and conditions 
of her people. Its chapters were painted 
in pictures or carved in statues which 
all men saw, and sung in hymns which 
all men heard. By such means its con- 
tents were made more familiar to the 
inhabitants of Corinth than are the con- 
tents of our Scriptures to the people 
of Christendom. It warned them with 
tremendous power to cast off the sins 
they cherished, and exhorted them with 
equal urgency to cherish the virtues 
they rejected. 

The temptations of Corinth were 
those which assail with special force 
commercial peoples. All her wealth, and 
she was the wealthiest of Greek cities, 
came from commerce. Merchants were 



OLD CORINTH 127 

her princes. As in America, business 
men were her sovereigns. 

The first chapter in her bible, as fa- 
miliar to all her children as the history 
of Joseph is to those in our Sunday- 
schools, told the story of Jason. When 
Corinth was young, Jason was sent on 
a divine business. It was the business 
of all merchants. Somewhere, behind 
barriers almost insuperable, hung a 
golden fleece. In spite of all obstacles 
he must get that fleece in an honorable 
way and use it as the gods should di- 
rect. He summoned the noblest men of 
his day to help him. They came will- 
ingly. In the ship Argo they started 
upon the quest. They fought dragons 
and conquered them. They battled with 
hunger and heat and cold and conquered 
them. Their struggles and well-earned 
victories made them the worthiest and 
strongest of the Greeks ; made them 
the world's heroes. Then Jason re- 



128 CITIES OF PAUL 

tired to Corinth. He did not under- 
stand that he had been sent after the 
fleece that his struggles might make him 
a hero. He thought only of the gold 
he had won. Having gained that, he 
laid up the good ship and left it to rot 
in the pine grove at Corinth, wasted ten 
years of sovereignty in selfish luxury, 
growing baser every year, and became 
false to his wife, who in revenge mur- 
dered his children. Sinking into deeper 
and deeper degradation, the hero's life 
ended in the sternest tragedy of Greek 
mythology. cc So must it be with every 
one who fancies that his business is to 
get money without discerning that his 
real business is to make sure his strug- 
gles after money hammer and carve him 
into a man," said this chapter. 

The second chapter, painted in many 
pictures, one of them by Polignotus so 
fine that it was placed beside the shrine 
of the oracle at Delphi, described in 



OLD CORINTH 129 

hymns which were sung in the sanctua- 
ries of Corinth as the psalms of David 
were sung in the temple at Jerusalem, 
exhibited another king of Corinth. He 
stands in a lake, but when he stoops to 
drink, the water flies from his lips. 
Luscious fruits hang over him, but when 
he lifts his hand to pluck them, the 
boughs spring upward beyond his reach. 
He is tortured by thirst and hunger, 
but he cannot die. But why is Tanta- 
lus tormented thus ? He had been in- 
trusted with a treasure of gold — observe, 
it is always gold that seduces in these 
Corinthian lessons — and bidden to 
guard it for Zeus. But he coveted the 
gold, kept it for himself, lied about it, 
when required to restore it declared he 
did not have it. He fancied the treasure 
could satisfy his desires, but found that 
it aggravated them. " The first million, 
which was to be more than enough, 
served only to triple the craving for the 



130 CITIES OF PAUL 

second million, and so on and on with 
every one who grows careless of his 
work in thinking of his wages," says 
this chapter. Who wrote it ? I cannot 
conceive unless it were He who said, 
" Blessed are they that hunger and thirst 
after righteousness : for they shall be 
filled." 

The third chapter is an extract from 
the biography of another king of Cor- 
inth. 

"Up the high hill he heaves a huge round stone." 

But when he has almost reached the 
top it slips by him, darts swiftly down, 
and the weary man must begin his task 
anew. And who is this ? " Sisyphus ! ,: 
every child in Corinth would have an- 
swered. " He used to cheat the mer- 
chants who came here to trade. Some 
say he rolled stones down the Citadel 
upon them and then stole their money 
from the mangled bodies, and now he 



OLD CORINTH 131 

has to roll stones forever, though no 
longer down hill." But many a modern 
man who has spent his life cornering 
the markets and ended in the poor- 
house has felt, " It is I, it is I ! " 

The caption of the fourth chapter I 
have already shown. It was written by 
the Emperor Hadrian and placed where 
every eye could read it. 

In 1896 Professor R. B. Richardson 
while excavating found a large number 
of small images of horses and horses' 
heads. They helped him to locate the 
great temple the foundations of which 
he discovered, for he knew they were vo- 
tive offerings. These offerings brought 
to the sanctuary by devout Corinthians 
more than two millenniums ago were to 
them in a way what hymn and prayer 
books are to us. They testify that the 
story of the horse was rooted in the 
minds of those worshipers as deeply as 
the memory of the Madonna in the 



132 CITIES OF PAUL 

mind of mediaeval Europe. And this 
is made still more apparent by the fact 
that when the city had been completely 
destroyed and its site had remained for 
more than a century a desert, two hun- 
dred years after Julius Caesar rebuilt it 
Hadrian found the legend of the horse 
still so familiar that he placed at the 
new reservoir a bronze of the winged 
steed delivering the stream from an up- 
lifted ivory hoof; for he knew that all 
in the city would understand its signifi- 
cance and hear it calling " Ho, every 
one that thirsteth ! " 

This is the story written in those clay 
hymnals, stamped on the coins, repeated 
in pictures, statues, poems before the 
eyes and in the ears of Corinth for cen- 
turies, and finally cast in bronze by 
Hadrian. 

A monster breathing fire and devour- 
ing men ravaged a distant land. No one 
could stand before it, for scales of brass 



OLD CORINTH 133 

covered its body and granite was as 
butter in its claws. At last a prince 
of Corinth, — Bellerophon by name, — 
moved with compassion for the afflicted 
land, watched at night by the spring of 
Peirene. In his hand was a bridle. No- 
tice the material ; it is gold this time also, 
but gold used as it should be. While 
men slept — it is the watchers only who 
see such things — the winged courser of 
Zeus descended light as a snowflake to 
drink at the holy fountain. The prince 
laid his hand upon the steed, put the 
gold bridle on its head, and guiding by 
that was carried swift as thought to the 
land where the Chimaera lay. Hovering 
over it he slew the monster with arrows 
shot from above. Mind you, only by 
weapons sent from that direction can 
such creatures be killed. 

Thus by the sight of their ideal hero, 
whenever at market they glanced at 
coins on which his image was stamped, 



134 CITIES OF PAUL 

or walked the streets, or entered the 
theatre, no less than when they went to 
church, the Corinthians were warned to 
use their wealth in such wise that it 
should guide aright the celestial coursers 
— the noble aspirations, the generous 
impulses — sent from heaven to slay 
the beasts that devour men. Thus " Go 
ye into all the world and preach the gos- 
pel to every creature " was stamped upon 
the coins with which they bought their 
daily bread. But their history shows that 
wherever they sent one angel they sent 
seven fiends, with every Bible as it were 
a cargo of whiskey, so that in Paul's age 
<c to Corinthianize " meant in all lan- 
guages that used the word " to go to the 
devil." 

For the people of Corinth heeded 
their bible about as much as we heed 
ours — no more, no less. Two facts will 
make this plain. 

I. Their riches came from the sea. It 



OLD CORINTH 135 

was natural, therefore, that they should 
worship the god of the ocean. At first 
they did so. Their oldest temple was 
built to Neptune. But they turned from 
the manly god who taught them to 
earn wealth to the flattering goddess 
who taught them to squander it, first 
in luxury, next in folly, and last in 
unspeakable debauchery. The Temple 
of Neptune remained at the base, but 
the Temple of Venus they put upon 
the summit of their citadel. There it 
advertised to all men that religion of 
sumptuous and sickening depravity for 
which Corinth became chiefly celebrated. 
That cult was the most conspicuous 
characteristic of the place, and from it 
the title of this paper should be taken 
if it were possible to make any truthful 
description of that characteristic fit for 
modern eyes. 

II. How old Corinth obeyed her 
bible is also shown by the Isthmian 



136 CITIES OF PAUL 

games, though their history was not 
completed until she had been destroyed, 
rebuilt, and made the " City of Par- 



venus." 



Those games were at first religious 
rites. He who taught Paul that men's 
bodies were temples of the Holy Spirit 
had long before revealed the same fact 
to Corinth. The piety and genius of 
Greece founded and fostered, in honor 
of the gods, these competitions which 
strengthened both body and mind. 
Only honorable men were permitted to 
enter them. That stadium hard by the 
Temple of Neptune was built by those 
who in contributing to its cost felt as 
we feel when we help to build a church. 
That row of marble cottages for the 
athletes and the magnificent gymnasium 
for their practice were erected by the 
same kind of devotion which erected the 
Minster of Cologne and the Church of 
St. Peter. 



OLD CORINTH 137 

Thirty days before the games began 
each applicant for the contests was re- 
quired to appear before a court of judges 
chosen from the noblest in the nation, 
and, after sacrifices to the gods, make 
oath that he was of pure Greek lineage ; 
that he had never committed an act of 
impiety ; that he had never been con- 
victed of a crime, and that he had 
trained faithfully ten months for the 
event. For thirty days more he must 
train in the Isthmian gymnasium, under 
the eye of the president, an official hon- 
ored more highly than is the president 
of any university in our country. 

The eventful day arrives. The foot 
race is called. " They that run in a race 
run all, but one receiveth the prize." 
And what is the prize ? A crown of 
parsley leaves, in later years of pine, but 
never a penny of money. His prize is 
the green crown testifying that its wearer 
has won honor for his native city, and 



138 CITIES OF PAUL 

telling him that his name will be sung 
by poets and his statue placed among 
those of the renowned. 

While these remained the sole re- 
wards, kings sought admission to the 
contests and the best men in Greece re- 
garded the race-course and the boxing- 
ring as Paul regarded that high career 
which he described by reference to them. 

But a change came. Neither money 
nor anything that had a money value 
was contended for at the Isthmian games. 
Their popularity, however, became so 
great that they were imitated throughout 
Asia Minor. The Isthmian victors were 
sought for as coaches. Great sums were 
given them for service in that capacity. 
They yielded to the temptation which 
conquered Jason, Tantalus, and Sisy- 
phus. Victory at Isthmia was sought 
as a lever with which to raise money at 
Ephesus and Antioch. Then the glory 
of Greek athletics passed into eclipse. 



OLD CORINTH 139 

Then came the period when the wise 
and the good regarded them as we regard 
the prize-ring, and when, glancing at 
Corinth, they scarcely knew whether they 
most despised its bullies striking with 
brass knuckles in the arena or its Syba- 
rites dancing with tinkling cymbals in 
the courts of Aphrodite. 



VI 
NEW CORINTH 

THE CITY OF THE PARVENUS 

The year 146 b. c. was blackened by 
two of the foulest deeds Rome ever per- 
petrated. Both of them were wrought 
by cupidity masking as patriotism. The 
patriotism was of that kind which Dr. 
Johnston branded as the last refuge of 
scoundrels. 

Carthage had been the rival of Rome. 
She was that no longer. Her navy de- 
stroyed, her army effaced, her condition 
was such that Cato's apprehensions of a 
second Hannibal had excited smiles in 
the Senate. But the merchants and bank- 
ers whom Cato despised brought about 
what his efforts failed to accomplish. 
Envious of her wealth and jealous of her 
commercial superiority, they persuaded 



NEW CORINTH 141 

the Conscript Fathers that Carthage 
should be exterminated. Sorely against 
his will Scipio was forced to destroy her. 
After a defense as heroic as it was hope- 
less, the splendid metropolis of Africa 
ceased to exist. Neither wall nor build- 
ing was left to mark its site. 

" Scipio, however, whom nature had 
designed for a nobler part than that of 
an executioner, gazed with horror on his 
own work ; and instead of the joy of 
victory the victor himself was haunted 
by a presentiment of the retribution that 
would inevitably follow such a mis- 
deed." x 

Upon Corinth that same year Rome 
committed a deed no less vile. That city 
also was a competitor, feared by the 
would-be monopolists of the Tiber, and 
their machinations eventuated in her ruin. 
It was as if England should grow strong 
enough and wicked enough to blot out 
1 Mommsen. 



H2 CITIES OF PAUL 

Hamburg and New York in order to 
appropriate their trade. 

€ * The mills of God grind slowly, 
But they grind exceeding small.' * 

These two iniquities, which, when un- 
dertaken, seemed to the majority expe- 
dient, are conspicuous among the causes 
of the " decline and fall of the Roman 
Empire." 

It was the absence from North Africa 
of a strong civilized power which en- 
abled the Vandals to establish themselves 
there, from that base to storm and pil- 
lage the Seven Hills and open the door 
for the Ostrogoths. Had Rome dealt 
honorably with Carthage, there would in 
all human probability have been such a 
power when it was sorely needed. Gen- 
seric and Theodoric were the divine re- 
ply to Scipio iEmilianus, long delayed 
but convincing when it came. 

Yet Rome was not killed by spears. 



NEW CORINTH 143 

She died of the plague. The seeds of it 
were brought by her victorious soldiers 
from Corinth and scattered over the 
whole of Italy. Great Rome murdered 
little Corinth easily by a single blow, but 
in dealing the blow she caught from her 
victim the disease which killed her. It 
would have been well for her had she 
remembered where it was that Ulysses 
went to get poison for his arrows. 

Before b. c. 146 Athens had died, 
Sparta had died, Thebes had died ; that 
is, if death is the flight of the spirit from 
the body. Each of these cities left a 
legacy of splendid deeds. The body of 
Corinth, like the others, still lingered. 
If accumulating money and using it so 
as to make the whole earth a pander to 
guilty passions while piety and patriot- 
ism steadily decay be prosperity, she was 
prosperous. If to fester with a moral 
leprosy so conspicuous that when any 
man in any nation between Spain and 



144 CITIES OF PAUL 

the Euphrates becomes eminent as a 
cheat or a debaucher his neighbors say 
" he has Corinthianized," be living, Cor- 
inth lived on, growing richer every year ; 
making herself a coffin of gold studded 
with jewels, and thinking it a throne. 

It is not surprising that when Greece, 
forgetting the days of her grandeur, ca- 
ressed the ears of Midas as fondly as 
Titania stroked those of Bottom, she 
put the wealthiest of her cities at the 
head of her confederacy. Corinth had 
money in abundance. What matter that 
she had little else but vices ? 

In proportion as men grow worthless 
they generally grow arrogant. So it 
was with Corinth. Roman ambassadors 
brought her a message she did not like. 
Without considering that they repre- 
sented swords and spears and shields and 
veteran legions to which she could op- 
pose only flowers and perfumes and 
pictures and dancing girls, she leered at 



NEW CORINTH 145 

them with senile insults ; drove them 
from the council chamber with yells of 
rage and flung filth of the streets upon 
them. Rome rejoiced when she heard 
of this. It brought the opportunity she 
craved. Her reply was Lucius Mura- 
mius, with orders to destroy the city which 
had insulted Roman ambassadors (in 
large letters) and diminished Roman 
trade (in very small ones, since the sting 
of the wasp is scarcely visible to the 
naked eye). He did the work thoroughly. 
Temples, palaces, gardens were de- 
spoiled. All property, public and private, 
was confiscated. A vast number of ves- 
sels laden with treasures of art were sent 
to the Tiber. The citizens were sold 
into slavery. The walls were leveled. 
Every building but one within their cir- 
cuit was razed. The ruins were fired. 

The devastation continued until the 
most gorgeous city in Greece, perhaps 
in the world, became a heap. Roman 



146 CITIES OF PAUL 

soldiers tore from the walls of temples 
and palaces pictures each worth a prince's 
ransom, and flung them on the ground 
for dice-boards, on which they gambled 
for female captives. The general ap- 
praised the spoils so accurately that he 
issued orders, in all seriousness, requir- 
ing captains of transports freighted with 
pictures by Polignotus and statues by 
Phidias and Praxiteles to replace every 
object missed from their cargoes. In a 
triumph more magnificent than Rome 
had ever witnessed, the treasures of Cor- 
inth were carried to the capital. The 
Imperial City thought she had conquered 
Greece. The reverse was true. Greece 
had begun to conquer her. The Hel- 
lenizing of Italy dates from the triumph 
of Mummius. The keenest-eyed of 
Roman historians wrote : — 

"The first result of the victory of 
Mummius was the death of faith and 
morality in Rome." 



NEW CORINTH 147 

Greek manners followed Greek wealth, 
Grecian luxury supplanted Roman sim- 
plicity, Greek skepticism drove out 
Roman faith, Greek vices corrupted 
Roman virtues. Thus the incurable 
cancer of which Rome ultimately per- 
ished began its work. The poison into 
which the wise man of Ithaca had tried 
to dip the arrows to be aimed at his ene- 
mies was taken by Roman fools to flavor 
their daily food. 

For a hundred years Corinth remained 
a desert. No human creature dwelt on 
its abandoned site. The only persons to 
be seen where the busiest mart in the 
world had been were paupers scratching 
the ground for bits of Corinthian brass, 
as fellahs and Arabs to-day search the 
deserted mounds beside the Nile and 
the Euphrates ; for the burning of Cor- 
inth, melting the vast number of gold, 
silver, and bronze statues which remained 
even after Attalus had filled with them 



148 CITIES OF PAUL 

the galleries of Pergamos, and Mum- 
mius had sent to Rome as many of them 
as he had ships to carry, produced a new 
amalgam named " Corinthian brass," 
which was valued more highly than 
gold. 1 

A hundred years after Mummius, 
Julius Caesar, alert to the commercial 
opportunities of the location, founded a 
second city on the ancient site. He peo- 
pled it with emancipated slaves. They 
were of various nationalities and diverse 
languages, but from such unpromising 
material his genius evolved a metropolis 
which reproduced in coarser colors the 
history of its predecessor. This was the 
city in which Paul wrote the Epistle to 

1 The doors of the " Gate Beautiful " in Herod's 
temple are said to have been of this material. It is 
probable that the stalk of that false vine drooping 
with clusters of emeralds and rubies, with which our 
Lord seems to have contrasted himself in speaking 
of the "true" vine of which his disciples are the 
branches, was also of the same. 



NEW CORINTH 149 

the Romans. For obvious reasons I call 
it "The City of the Parvenus." In ap- 
pearance it seems to have been a repro- 
duction of ancient Corinth so far as a 
stone-mason can reproduce a statue by 
Phidias, or a sign painter a picture by 
Raphael. It copied the manners of Old 
Corinth so far as a washerwoman sud- 
denly enriched can imitate the graces of 
Agnes Sorel or a bootblack ape the cour- 
tesies of Chesterfield. The morals of the 
old aristocracy were more easily adopted. 
New Corinth may be named — I think 
Robertson called it so — the door-mat 
upon which foreigners wiped their feet 
before entering the enchanted land. De- 
praved as Greek manners became, they 
remained always dainty, elegant, refined. 
Gorgeous as Roman manners became, 
they never ceased to be clumsy, arrogant, 
and coarse. The depravity of Greece 
married the brutality of Rome, and their 
offspring was New Corinth. This was 



150 CITIES OF PAUL 

the city in which Paul spent eighteen 
months. The Judaeans tried to drive 
him from it by violence, as he had been 
driven from Philippi, but the Roman 
governor suppressed the riot, and the 
mob gave its leaders a drubbing at the 
whipping-post. The incident reeks of 
lynch law, as was to be expected in such 
a place. At Corinth the Apostle was al- 
most mastered by a depression of spirits 
which threatened to paralyze his useful- 
ness. There is little doubt that it was 
caused by the sight of the depravities 
around him. They made his work seem 
hopeless. The appalling catalogue of 
vices in the first chapter of Romans he 
wrote here. It is only a description of 
what was going on before his eyes. 

And now let us open a few of the 
windows in the epistles to the Corin- 
thians, through which glimpses of the 
city may be seen. No other letter in 
the New Testament is so full of local 



NEW CORINTH 151 

color as the first of these. No other is 
so minutely adapted to the special needs 
of its original recipients, yet it is the only 
one addressed to " all that call upon the 
name of our Lord Jesus Christ in every 
place/' and more than all of Paul's other 
epistles combined, it has served as a 
church manual in all times and regions. 

I. Some of the allusions by which the 
Apostle describes his own work and feel- 
ings : — 

The two strands binding the new 
city to the old one were the Isthmian 
games and the Venus cult. Through all 
vicissitudes except during the century 
of its complete desolation, when they 
were held a few miles away, the Isthmian 
games continued at Corinth. Therefore 
Paul was sure to be understood by the 
Corinthians when he wrote them that 
he was a boxer, not beating the air, but 
hitting straight from the shoulder as the 
Isthmian athletes did ; a runner, running 



152 CITIES OF PAUL 

as the Isthmian athletes ran. He de- 
clared that he disciplined himself as the 
Isthmian athletes had to do before they 
could be admitted to the competitions, 
lest while he preached to others he 
should become a cc cast-away/ * which 
was the technical term for one who 
failed to pass the Isthmian examinations. 
Again, at Isthmia Roman gladiatorial 
shows first entered Greece. Therefore 
the Corinthians would understand the 
"Morituri Salutamus" in i Corinthians 
iv, 9. He declared he had been made "a 
spectacle " both to angels and men. 

One of the most conspicuous build- 
ings in Corinth was its theatre. Profes- 
sor Richardson has recovered its site. It 
was one of the three objects first seen by 
visitors whether they approached from 
the north by Lechaeum harbor, from the 
east by Cenchreae, or by the northeast 
from Athens, and it stood unroofed, 
open to the sky. May it not be that 



NEW CORINTH 153 

the recollection of this structure moved 
the Apostle to employ the word " the- 
atre " in the more picturesque but less 
usual sense of " spectacle ? " 

He describes himself and his fellow 
disciples — or perhaps he tactfully refers 
to himself only — as the " offscourings 
of the earth ; " weak, helpless, worthless 
except for the sustaining power of Christ. 
The epithet was an accurate description 
— familiar too — of the rabble which 
Julius Caesar had sent to people New 
Corinth, but which his genius had 
moulded into a great and splendid city. 

Was not the Apostle thinking of the 
appalling doom of Old Corinth when, in 
the Second Epistle, he wrote the poignant 
entreaty which seems to press home the 
whole contents of his letter, " Now then 
we are ambassadors for Christ, as though 
God did beseech you by us : we pray 
you in Christ's stead, be ye reconciled to 
God." 



154 CITIES OF PAUL 

II. Note some of the allusions used 
to describe Christ and his church. The 
oldest building in Corinth was a Doric 
temple, of which until the earthquake 
of a. d. 1858 five stately columns re- 
mained. Three I believe are still erect, 
the only work of human hands remain- 
ing above ground to mark the ancient 
site. Through the effacing devastations 
which had annihilated other structures 
this temple had stood in solitary gran- 
deur; not of course unscathed, but 
damaged so slightly that it had been 
repaired and appeared in New Corinth 
almost as superb as it had been in the 
elder city. Thus it repeated to every 
Corinthian who should read them the 
words, " Other foundation (enduring 
foundation) can no man lay than that 
which is laid, which is Jesus Christ." 
Every man's work shall be tried by fire 
as that temple has been, and if any man's 
work abide (as it has done) cc he shall 



NEW CORINTH 155 

receive a reward." As is your temple so 
is Christ's church. It, too, shall outlast 
all fires. 

In another way I think he repeated 
the same truth, though this I suggest 
with hesitation. 

The most remarkable feature in the to- 
pography of Corinth was its rock citadel, 
towering behind the city and supplying 
all the water it had. 

cc Our fathers," wrote Paul, " drank 
of a spiritual rock that followed them ; 
and the rock was Christ." 

Attempts have been made to explain 
the figure by reference to a late rabbini- 
cal legend that the rock smitten by 
Moses, or a part of it, moved in the wake 
of the Israelites on their way to Pales- 
tine and supplied them with water. 
That suggestion seems to me absurd. 
The natural meaning of the word used 
by Paul is " cliff" rather than "rock," 
and the allusion sounds to me like a 



156 CITIES OF PAUL 

reminiscence of the Acrocorinthus. As 
that cliff supplies the city before it, so 
Christ follows his people always to give 
them " living water." 

Again, the little plain not far north- 
west of the city was one of the most 
fertile in Greece. As such it was pro- 
verbial. A Greek who had a farm to sell 
would be likely to say, cc It is as rich as 
the plain of Sicyon." On every other 
side of Corinth the land was notoriously 
barren. Remember this when you read 
what the Apostle wrote about sowing 
and reaping. An oasis attracts more at- 
tention than a prairie. 

III.vBut the three most familiar pas- 
sages in all Paul's writings, the three 
which we all know by heart, are the 
13 th of First Corinthians, which treats of 
love, the 15th of the same epistle, and 
the 5th of Second Corinthians, which 
affirm the resurrection of the body. 
How came they to be written ? 



NEW CORINTH 157 

We have seen that Corinth adored the 
goddess of the body as Athens adored 
the deity of mind. The message given 
to Corinth was this, " Worship God with 
your bodies/' She did not long obey it. 
She soon made the servant the master, 
and began to worship the body itself. 
Hence came her depravities and her ruin. 
Post-apostolic teachers, when they found 
communities traveling that same bad 
road, tried to save them by preaching 
asceticism, that is, by contempt and abuse 
of the body. Their doctrine was, " You 
have pampered your bodies and become 
vile. Reverse this and grow good. 
Starve your bodies, scourge them, walk 
on nails, go into monasteries. That is 
the road to sanctity." 

Paul said no such thing. As he had 
said to the men of Athens, cc Whom 
therefore ye ignorantly worship, him de- 
clare I unto you," so he simply repeated 
to the Corinthians their own original and 



158 CITIES OF PAUL 

acknowledged creed in an intelligible 
way and urged them to obey the com- 
mand given them in the beginning. He 
said to them, as the Isthmian games had 
said before they were perverted, "Glorify 
God in your body." "Whether there- 
fore ye eat, or drink, or whatsoever " 
bodily act "ye do, do all to the glory of 
God." For this purpose the Isthmian 
games were instituted, and for this even 
the worship of Aphrodite was begun. 
Through forgetting that purpose the 
Aphrodite cult had become a cesspool 
that may not be described. A thousand 
sirens alluring to ruin were the priest- 
esses that ministered at her temple in 
Old Corinth, and there the nameless in- 
famies catalogued in the Epistle to the 
Romans had set the fashions which New 
Corinth followed. So far had this gone 
that the Apostle wrote two whole chap- 
ters for an antiseptic to the sewage which 
had oozed from the Temple of Venus 



NEW CORINTH 159 

into the church of Christ, and was 
obliged to bid the Christian women of 
Corinth keep silence even in the meet- 
ings of believers, lest they should be 
mistaken for priestesses of shame. 

It was because the Corinthians had 
perverted the Lord's Supper into an im- 
itation of the Venus cult orgies, where 
gluttony and drunkenness were rife, that 
he warned them against celebrating it in 
a manner so unworthy. 

All this shamefulness was practiced 
under the name of love. How did Paul 
fight it ? 

"If I speak with the tongues of men 
and of angels, but have not love, I am 
become sounding brass, or a clanging 
cymbal." 

" Faith, hope, love, . . . and the great- 
est of these is love!" The false must 
fly when the true appears. To discredit 
the counterfeit he shows the genuine 
bill. 



160 CITIES OF PAUL 

We come now to the 15th of First 
and the 5th of Second Corinthians. 

Remember that both Old and New 
Corinth worshiped the goddess of the 
body, that the Isthmian games were es- 
tablished to honor Deity by the develop- 
ment of physical strength and beauty, 
that the Venus cult sprang from the 
same root. 

Observe how often and with what 
emphasis in the two epistles Paul refers 
to the body, — to its purposes, its dig- 
nity, the honor divinely put upon it, 
and the duty of not obeying but con- 
trolling its impulses. " Glorify God with 
your bodies " may almost be called the 
theme of which the two,epistles form the 
symphony. In that culminating chapter 
wherein the Apostle turns the powers of 
the world to come upon the wheels of 
present duty, and, reading the writings 
of time by the light of eternity, exclaims, 
" O death, where is thy sting," his text 



NEW CORINTH 161 

is not the immortal spirit, but the mortal 
body. He urges men so to live that their 
" mortal bodies " may be, as their Maker 
means them to be, germs of immortal 
ones ; spiritual bodies that shall be to 
these of flesh and blood as tulips to their 
bulbs or roses to their seeds. Thus again 
he recalls the Corinthians to their origi- 
nal creed, given them long before by the 
same Power who spake through his lips 
and pen. They had perverted the mes- 
sage beyond the recognition of any eye 
unopened by the Spirit who had caught 
it in the beginning. 

Your bodies, wrote Paul, are temples 
of the Holy Spirit. If we glorify Him 
in them, this corruptible shall put on 
incorruption, and death shall be swal- 
lowed up in victory. So the Apostle 
seems to me to teach. 

That truth, written in Hebrew liter- 
ature by Isaiah, had been carved by un- 
known architects, and to a seer's eyes was 



1 62 CITIES OF PAUL 

still legible upon the foundation stones 
of the temples of Poseidon and Aphro- 
dite. 

" For we know/' reiterates the Apos- 
tle, substituting for the figure of plant 
life passing out of its seed shell into a 
glorified body, that of a man moving out 
of a tent pitched for a night into a pal- 
ace constructed for eternity, " that if our 
earthly house of this tabernacle were dis- 
solved, we have a building of God, an 
house not made with hands, eternal in the 
heavens. ,> 



VII 
COLOSSI 

THE CITY OF THE SLAVE 

Some ninety miles eastward from Ephe- 
sus the river Lycos joins the Meander 
on its way to the iEgean. Here high 
mountains approaching each other from 
the north and the south leave a narrow 
passage for the commingled waters, then 
retreat and come close together again ten 
miles farther east. The plain they inclose 
is the Lycos valley. In shape it resembles 
an obtuse-angled triangle. The moun- 
tains which rim it are rugged, and some 
of their peaks rise more than eight thou- 
sand feet above the sea. Upon this plain 
were three cities grouped by St. Paul 
almost as parts of a single metropolis. 

At the northwest angle of the valley 
upon the mountain-side was Hierapolis, 



1 64 CITIES OF PAUL 

or in English the " Sacred City." It was 
celebrated for a cave of superb stalactites 
and a mephitic spring the vapors from 
which were believed to inspire priests and 
poison laymen. Here was a great tem- 
ple to Cybele which long before Paul's 
day had been a centre of Phrygian wor- 
ship. Here, too, in later times dwelt 
Bishop Papias, believed by some — 
though probably on insufficient grounds 
— to have been the amanuensis of " the 
disciple whom Jesus loved." Here, too, 
there is some reason to think that the 
four daughters of Philip the Evangelist 
" which did prophesy " spent their last 
days. What, however, gives the place its 
chief interest for us is an uncontroverted 
fact to be mentioned presently. 

Six miles south of Hierapolis, at the 
southwest angle of the plain, south also 
of the Lycos, was a city named originally 
" Jove's-town," but renamed after his 
wife, by one of the Seleucids, " Laodicea." 



COLOSSI 165 

An emporium of trade, possessing a 
widely celebrated sanitarium or Temple 
of iEsculapius, the priests of which were 
believed to have the secret for manu- 
facturing an eye-salve of unequaled vir- 
tue, the wealthiest and most luxurious 
city between Ephesus and Antioch, Lao- 
dicea is remembered only on account of 
the caustic letter drawn from the author 
of the Apocalypse by the laxity of her 
Christians. 

At the southeast angle of the plain, 
ten miles east-southeast of Laodicea, 
was Colossae. It was perched upon a 
shelf or foothill where the Lycos had 
cut a gorge through the mountain ridge. 
The gorge, steep and narrow, bisected the 
city, and is said by Professor Ramsay to 
be two and a half miles long, varying in 
width between one hundred and fifty 
and two hundred and fifty feet. The 
" Royal Road " which connected Smyrna 
and Ephesus with Persia ran through 



1 66 CITIES OF PAUL 

the Lycos valley and gave importance 
to each of its three cities. 

For a long time Colossae was the 
most considerable of the three, but in 
the time of Paul Laodicea had taken 
precedence and Colossae was compara- 
tively insignificant. At that time it was 
the home of a certain good-for-nothing 
slave, a thief and a vagabond, and of his 
master, a refined Christian gentleman. 
This fact alone has given it distinction 
for all ages. Providence has used the 
insignificance of the place as art has 
employed the monotony of the Nile to 
emphasize the grandeur of the pyramids. 
Paul has brought it about that we must 
think of Colossae because the name is in 
the New Testament, and that in think- 
ing of Colossae nothing shall distract our 
attention from two facts more important 
for us to know than anything taught by 
the splendors of Ephesus. Those facts 
are: — 



COLOSSI 167 

I. How the Christian church was 
cradled, fostered, and made the strongest 
power in the world. 

II. How it attacked and destroyed 
the most malignant social and political 
disease of antiquity, a disease which ap- 
peared to such men as Cicero, Epictetus, 
and Juvenal to be both deadly and in- 
curable. 

There are times when Christian pa- 
triots lose heart as they pause to take 
breath in their conflicts with the worship 
of Mammon. A glance backward should 
revive their faith. 

In the year a. d. 35 the wealth, the 
fashion, the intellectual life of the world, 
all its literature, all its science, all its art, 
all its philosophy, all its religions, all its 
business, all its soldiers, all its ships, both 
of commerce and of war, all its amuse- 
ments, all its statesmen, all its politi- 
cians, all its rulers, all its lawyers, and 
most important of all, its little children 



1 68 CITIES OF PAUL 

were precisely as they would have been 
if no sermon had been preached on the 
mountain and no voice had prayed, 
" Father ! forgive them." 

Three centuries later all was changed* 
The powers of the state were nominally 
Christian ; the world's ships were steered 
by the pilots of Galilee, its buildings 
constructed by the carpenter of Naza- 
reth, its costliest marbles inscribed with 
his name. How did the change come to 
pass ? The two epistles sent by Paul to 
Colossae reveal the secret. 

St. Paul is a prisoner at Rome. Near 
three hundred thousand persons are in 
the great circus of that city. Some are 
swearing, some are betting, some are 
fighting. All are alert with excitement, 
for it is race day. The most admired 
men in Rome are the jockeys who will 
soon appear, one wearing a white, one a 
red, one a blue, but the favorite a green 
cap. It is some years before the advent 



COLOSSI 169 

of the charioteer Diodes, whose skill as 
a whip brought him a fortune so great 
that he left his son a million and a quar- 
ter pounds sterling, but it is nearing the 
time when Juvenal declared a jockey 
could earn a hundred-fold more than a 
leading lawyer; the time of which he 
wrote, "The whole of Rome has flocked 
to the circus to-day, and the uproar 
of the crowd can be heard miles away." 
Caligula, by spending in the stables the 
time he should have passed in the Sen- 
ate, has made the society of jockeys more 
envied than that of Conscript Fathers, 
and Nero, though he began by pretend- 
ing to frown upon that scandal, has cast 
off disguises and taught the populace to 
regard his sceptre as a trifle compared 
with his whip. 

On the Aventine, overlooking the 
great circus and within sound of its tur- 
moil, was a small house where dwelt a 
man named Aquila with his wife Priscilla. 



170 CITIES OF PAUL 

They had met Paul at Corinth a few 
years before, had been his hosts there, 
and to Ephesus the three had journeyed 
together. 

And now in their little parlor at 
Rome the man and his wife with a 
few friends, among whom probably are 
Pudens and his daughter Pudentia, are 
praying for their imprisoned friend and 
teacher. To human ears their prayers 
would seem to float on the roar of the 
circus as chips on the maelstrom. They 
are praying to Christ, and Rome does 
not know that they are there. But when 
the races are over they keep on praying. 
Others join them, one by one, until the 
little parlor is too small to hold their 
number. A partition is knocked out. In 
due time from this seed will grow what 
we call a church. It is already what Paul 
meant by that name. It is like the house 
of Pudens which, after being buried by 
the debris of centuries, will be excavated, 



COLOSSI 171 

and on its floor a mosaic found of the 
Saviour holding a book upon which is 
written, " The Lord, defender of the 
house of Pudens." 

Could any vision appear to most of 
the contemporaries of Paul more fantas- 
tic than one declaring that the prayer- 
room of Aquila should supplant the 
circus of Nero ? 

While Paul in his prison was cheered 
by the prayers of these humble people, 
two visitors came to him. One was a well- 
known traveler from the East named 
Epaphras. He tells how a certain rich 
man, Philemon, an acquaintance of both, 
has, with his wife Apphia, established in 
his home at Colossae such another prayer- 
meeting as that of Aquila. " But," 
Epaphras seems to have said, " you had 
better write them a letter, for in spite of 
all you told them some of those breth- 
ren, influenced partly by the priests of 
Hierapolis and still more by the Jews 



172 CITIES OF PAUL 

of Laodicea, are coming to think that 
Christ is a hard master, and that they can 
please him only by painful penances. 
Instead of enjoying the liberty you 
preached, they are acting as slaves of a 
cruel lord." 

So Paul wrote the Epistle to the Co- 
lossians, but before he had finished it, 
perhaps, another visitor appeared. He 
is in rags, half starved, and looks like 
a hunted hare. There may have been a 
conversation something like this : — 

" Who are you ? " 

cc My name is Onesimus. I am a slave. 
I belong to Philemon of Colossae. I 
robbed him and ran away. The police 
are after me. I don't know what to do." 

" Why have you come to me ? " 

" I was with my master in Ephesus, 
and heard what you said — and — and 
I have nowhere else to go." 

Some years ago my bell rang softly. 
I opened the door. There stood a little 



COLOSSI 173 

girl. She was thinly clad and shivering, 
for it was winter. Hungry too. 

" Is this Minister Wright's house ? ,: 
asked the waif. 

"Yes!" 

" Are you Minister Wright ? " 

"Yes!" 

" Take me." 

She was cold and hungry, and, worse 
than either, a lost child. She had heard, 
perhaps in some mission school, that 
Jesus loved little children, and with swift 
childlike logic inferred that therefore 
Christ's ministers must take care of them. 
I named her my "Onesima," for she made 
me understand how Paul felt when he 
wrote that second letter to Colossae in 
behalf of the slave who knew only that 
he was lost, and that the Apostle was the 
minister of One who came to seek and 
to save that which was lost. 

These two epistles, sent, the one to 
Philemon and the other to the church 



174 CITIES OF PAUL 

which was in his house, both of them 
full of affectionate greetings from the 
little Christian Endeavor Society in 
Rome, show how the early church, unre- 
garded and unnoticed by the conspicuous 
powers of the time, undermined and 
supplanted them all by quietly training 
fathers and mothers, masters and slaves 
and little children, poor men and rich 
men, in their homes and in their shops, 
to try to " do these sayings of mine." 
They show us how Christianity achieved 
that task, apparently the most hopeless 
ever set before men, the abolition of 
slavery. 

Outside of Palestine slavery was uni- 
versal. The work of city and country 
was done by slaves. They were not re- 
garded as human. For them the laws 
afforded no protection. Their enormous 
numbers inspired general apprehension, 
and many of the cruelties practiced upon 
them by their masters were caused by the 



COLOSSUS 175 

conviction that they could be kept in 
subjection by fear alone. Thus, when a 
certain slave slew with a small spear, 
single-handed, a boar so fierce that the 
hunters dared not face it, and thereby 
saved the lives of some of them, his Ro- 
man master had him crucified for carry- 
ing a weapon, and Cicero remarked that 
perhaps the master had been a little harsh, 
but he would not venture an opinion. 
When a slave was cut into mince meat 
and thrown to the eels for dropping a 
glass goblet, no indignation was expressed 
by the guests at the banquet. 

Two incidents which probably oc- 
curred while Paul was a prisoner at 
Rome may serve to show what slavery 
in that city was. The first, cited by Cel- 
sus and accepted by Origen as true, was 
this. A slave boy born at Hierapolis, 
the city near Colossae, as we have seen, 
came into the possession of Epaphrodi- 
tus, who, himself a slave, had become a 



176 CITIES OF PAUL 

freedman and was Nero's most trusted 
intimate. The child was weak and sickly, 
and his master hated him. I suppose 
his animosity was inspired by the inher- 
ent malignity felt by vice toward virtue. 
The master was amusing himself by tor- 
turing the slave when the little fellow 
said, " Master, you '11 break that leg if 
you twist it any more." 

Another wrench. The leg was broken. 
Without a cry or the change of a feature 
the child said : — 

" There, I told you you would break 
it!" 

The boy was Epictetus. 

Paul may have known of this, for it 
occurred in " Caesar's household." 

While Paul was a prisoner, a slave at 
Rome killed his master Pedanius. It was 
the law that all the slaves of the mur- 
dered man should be slaughtered. Pe- 
danius had four hundred, many of them 
women and children. It was proposed 



COLOSSiE 177 

to make an exception by sparing the 
children. The proposal called forth an 
impassioned speech from one of the 
ablest senators, in which he said : — 

"We have in our service whole na- 
tions of slaves, the scum of mankind, 
collected from all quarters of the earth : 
a race of men who bring with them 
foreign rites and the religion of their 
country or no religion at all. In such a 
conflux if the laws are silent what pro- 
tection remains for the master ? " 

This protest was effectual. The law 
took its course. The four hundred — 
men, women, and children — were slaugh- 
tered. 

At this time — let it be remem- 
bered in honor of the Apostle — to give 
food or shelter, to conceal or in any way 
assist a fugitive slave was to incur the 
penalty of death. This Paul knew when 
Onesimus came to him. He did not 
justify the suppliant for robbing his mas- 



178 CITIES OF PAUL 

ter or even for running away. He does 
not seem even to have been aware that 
slavery was wrong. He had just written 
the letter in which he said, cc Slaves, 
obey in all things your masters accord- 
ing to the flesh, not with eye service as 
men pleasers, but in singleness of heart, 
fearing God," as if he thought slavery 
a divine institution. But he writes to 
Philemon, the slave's master, reminding 
him that the slave is a Christian, a 
brother therefore, and that we are all 
alike Christ's slaves and must treat our 
slaves as Christ treats his. He speaks 
of himself and Epaphras as ic slaves of 
Christ," but calls Onesimus " a brother 
beloved." 

To the slave he said in substance, 
" All things whatsoever ye would that 
men should do to you, do ye even so 
to them." To the master he said the 
same. Through obedience to such teach- 
ing, without help of human law, or even 



COLOSSI 179 

protest against its iniquities, slavery dis- 
appeared. 

There is a bondage worse than that 
of Onesimus. The slavery of the ergas- 
tula was mild compared to that of the 
palace. Well might Caligula have en- 
vied Onesimus. That emperor, the son 
of Germanicus, was the idol of Rome. 
When he took the sceptre the Romans 
called him their " star," their " darling." 
They offered a hundred and sixty thou- 
sand victims upon their altars, to pur- 
chase blessings upon him from the gods 
in whom they believed. They thronged 
their temples, and scores of them offered 
their lives to the unseen powers as a ran- 
som for his. They inscribed his name 
upon a shield of gold, and decreed that 
upon an appointed day each year their 
priests, their senators, and their noblest 
young men and maidens should carry it 
to the Capitol with paeans for his virtues 
and prayers for his prosperity. When he 



180 CITIES OF PAUL 

ordered the heads to be removed from 
the statues of the great gods and replaced 
by copies of his own, put a gold image 
of himself in the temple built for his 
worship, and had it clothed each day in 
robes like those he chose that day to 
wear, no protest checked his arrogance. 
His wealth was beyond computation. He 
could form no wish within the power of 
man to gratify which was not imme- 
diately performed. Yet within the com- 
pass of his empire there was probably no 
other slave so wretched as he. 

When it thunders this divine man 
wraps his head in his cloth of gold and 
creeps under the bed quaking for fear 
of the gods he has supplanted. He 
flies to Naples, and the smoke of Ve- 
suvius terrifies him into spasms. Three 
hours of the twenty-four are the most 
he ever hopes to sleep, and during them 
he is tortured by horrible dreams. In 
them he hears the sea roaring, sees it 



COLOSSI 181 

draw nearer and nearer while he vainly 
attempts to fly, shrieks as he mistakes 
his own cold sweat of fear for its waters. 
He leaps from his bed and wanders 
through the gorgeous corridors of his 
palace. He dares not have them lighted, 
for to his tortured brain assassination 
seems to lurk behind every pillar, and 
light will show the dagger where to 
strike. He is not mad. De Quincey's 
attempt to prove him so proves only the 
insanity of vicious passions unrestrained. 
His crimes are his only chains. They are 
the furies which have built the prison 
from which he cannot escape. In vain 
he tries by superstitious rites to unlock 
the iron gates of his penitentiary. 

This terrified man is a colossal por- 
trait of those among the Christians of 
Colossae for whose help Paul wrote. 
Conscience, long entranced by heathen 
abominations, had been awakened by the 
vision of Christ. How to appease it 



1 82 CITIES OF PAUL 

became the absorbing quest of the neo- 
phytes. Hierapolis had long been the 
centre of a cult which taught that the 
unseen powers could be propitiated by 
ascetic tortures and in no other way. 
In the whole circle of the Roman Em- 
pire there was no other religious system 
which called for self-torments and mu- 
tilations so unspeakable as those de- 
manded by Sabazius and Cybele. The 
contact of Christianity with paganism 
destroyed paganism, but it also modified 
Christianity. In conquering the Roman 
eagles it turned the dove of Bethabara 
into a bird of prey. Constantine placed 
the cross above the sword, but only to 
make it a more effective weapon of war. 
And when Liberius substituted Christ- 
mas for the Saturnalia, the rioters, driven 
from the cradle of Saturnus, reassembled 
around the manger of Christ. To such 
dangers Paul was unceasingly alert. 
There can be little doubt that it was 



COLOSSI 183 

largely the influence of Hierapolis which 
opened the ears of Colossians to Juda- 
izing teachers, who substituted forms 
and penances for trust in the Father and 
made them deaf to the " Come unto me." 

The Epistle to Philemon was the un- 
conscious proclamation of liberty to the 
slave of circumstances. 

The Epistle to the Colossians was the 
conscious proclamation of liberty to the 
slave of self. The former was under- 
stood and obeyed centuries before Lu- 
ther re taught the world the meaning of 
the latter. 



VIII 
ANCYRA 

THE CITY OF THE WEATHERCOCKS 

Until quite recently the province of 
Central Asia Minor, marked on modern 
maps "Angora," was regarded without 
question as the Galatia of St. Paul. Cer- 
tain scholars of repute now think that 
it is not, and locate the " churches of 
Galatia " addressed by the Apostle in a 
region farther south. Those who care to 
examine the arguments for and against 
the new theory will find them stated with 
fairness and force in the Encyclopedia 
Biblica. I do not think they have over- 
thrown or even seriously undermined 
the long-accepted view. The correctness 
of that view seems to me confirmed 
by the facts which justify the title of 
this paper — facts which show clearly 



ANCYRA 185 

that the contents of the Epistle to the 
Galatians answer to the known charac- 
teristics of the North Galatians as a screw 
fits into its matrix. 

Ancyra was their capital city. The 
word signifies an anchor. Tradition said 
that Midas found an anchor buried in the 
ground, built a city over it, and named 
the place after his find. To readers who 
recall the history of its people the name 
will seem like an oak in a cornfield, 
or like John the Baptist among reeds 
shaken by the wind. 

It is the business of an anchor to stand 
fast against all currents ; of a weathercock 
to move at the touch of every breeze. 
Yet with equal fidelity to facts we may 
call Ancyra an anchor or a weathercock, 
since it has for millenniums held a race to 
its place in history against forces work- 
ing with tremendous power to efface it 
from human sight and memory, yet has 
shown conspicuously the peculiar quali- 



1 86 CITIES OF PAUL 

ties of that race which are correctly repre- 
sented by a weather vane. 

cf The prominent qualities of the Celtic 
race/' says Mommsen, quoting Thierry, 
cc were personal bravery, in which they 
excelled all nations ; an open, impetuous 
temperament accessible to every impres- 
sion ; much intelligence but at the same 
time extreme mobility, want of perse- 
verance, aversion to discipline and order ; 
ostentation and perpetual discord — the 
result of boundless vanity." " Such 
qualities," adds Mommsen, "those of 
good soldiers and bad citizens, explain 
the historic fact that the Celts have 
shaken all states and have founded 



none." 



Now the Epistle to the Galatians is a 
protest against these qualities, which may 
be summed up in the single word "fickle- 
ness." Notice a few of the Apostle's vari- 
ations upon that theme. 

" I marvel that ye are so soon removed 



ANCYRA 187 

from him that called you into the grace 
of Christ unto another gospel." 

cc O foolish Galatians, who hath be- 
witched you, . . . before whose eyes 
Jesus Christ hath been evidently set 
forth, crucified among you ? " 

<c Stand fast therefore in the liberty 
wherewith Christ hath made us free, 
and be not entangled again with the 
yoke of bondage." 

He contrasts his own steadfastness 
with their vacillations. 

He asks them why it is that whereas 
a little while ago they were ready to give 
their eyes for him, they now regard him 
as their enemy. 

Thus the Apostle expressed the ver- 
dict of history. 

Ancyra lay some two hundred miles 
east-southeast of Constantinople. Un- 
der its modern name, Angora, it is cele- 
brated for three things : the amount of 
electricity in its atmosphere, which at 



1 88 CITIES OF PAUL 

times makes a blanket seem a sheet of 
flame ; the silky hair of its dogs, its 
goats, and its cats ; the fact that these 
animals when removed but thirty miles 
from their birthplace change their coats 
and become like other dogs and goats 
and cats. 

The inhabitants of the small region 
named Galatia, or the " Gaul's Coun- 
try/' were as different from their neigh- 
bors as is an outcrop of trap from the 
field of quartz in which it appears. Their 
district consisted of three cantons, of 
which Ancyra, Pessinus, and Tavium 
were the respective capitals. 

Tavium was noted for its sacred 
grove, — probably a memorial of Druid 
worship changed to the service of Jupiter, 
— which contained a colossal bronze of 
Jove, and was to its canton, perhaps to 
all three cantons, what the Cities of 
Refuge were to Israel in the time of the 
Judges, or Notre Dame to Paris during 



ANCYRA 189 

the Middle Ages. Pessinus was distin- 
guished by a temple to Cybele, in which 
a black meteorite was adored as an 
image of that goddess. Many thought 
that the manner of its advent had given 
name to the place, for " Pessinus " may 
mean " fallen/' and " from heaven " 
might have been understood. 

Ancyra, however, the largest and most 
important of these capitals, may be 
counted the " metropolis ' or mother 
city of Galatia, and is therefore selected 
as representative of all those to whom 
St. Paul's epistle was addressed. They 
belonged to the same stock as the French 
and Irish, and their history is a panorama 
of the two most conspicuous traits of 
Gallic character, — that passion for La 
Gloire which mistook the bulletins of 
Napoleon for the oracles of omnipotence, 
and that fickleness which in eighteen 
years changed its religion four times and 
its government twelve. 



i 9 o CITIES OF PAUL 

One of the pictures painted indelibly 
upon my memory in childhood is that 
of the Roman Senate in the year 391 b. a, 
when the Gallic " Brennus " or " king ,J 
had broken into Rome. The grand old 
senators, who disdain to fly, sit calmly in 
their accustomed places. Their white 
beards flow over their magnificent offi- 
cial robes. The gigantic warriors who 
have rushed in with murderous intent, 
awed by the sight, sink their swords, 
afraid to strike, and whisper, " They are 
not men. They are gods ! " 

My mother taught me to read in that 
picture the triumph of mind over muscle. 
She told me those Gauls were the most 
terrific foemen Rome ever encountered. 
So terrible were they that the date of 
their invasion was recorded in the Roman 
calendar as " The Black Day," and a 
sinking fund was established in the Cap- 
itol never to be used except for defense 
against them. She taught me to under- 



ANCYRA 191 

stand why it was that the equipment 
of the Roman soldier was changed after 
that invasion into a fashion adapted to 
resist the Gallic style of attack, and thus 
was born the Roman legion, which in 
due time, like Alexander's phalanx, con- 
quered the world. She told me how 

The Roman matron long did tame 
The fro ward child with Brennus' name, 
And Italy's maidens long grew pale 
When Brennus' sword inspired the tale. 

Though unwelcome facts have tried 
to blur the picture, they have but par- 
tially succeeded, and it is hard for me to 
feel the gratitude I owe to those who 
have taught me that it was not senators 
remaining in their chamber because they 
disdained to fly, but old men sitting on 
their doorsteps because they were too 
weak to run away, and that though the 
Gauls were for a moment awed by their 
venerable appearance (criticism has not 
yet, I believe, shaved off the august 



192 CITIES OF PAUL 

beards) or — what is more probable — 
were restrained by pity for their feeble- 
ness, they soon killed them, every one. 
A hundred and eleven years after 
Brennus's sword and the cackling geese, 
another " Brennus " or Gallic king burst 
into Asia Minor and caused a reign of 
terror there. When his fierce followers 
had cast anchor in the district named 
after them " Galatia," they continued to 
be, until their power was broken by 
Pergamos, the virtual arbiters in the con- 
flicts which were perpetually arising be- 
tween the rival kinglets of Asia Minor. 
They rarely made war on their own ac- 
count and did not enlarge their territory, 
but lived in splendor by loaning their 
arms to the sovereign who bid highest 
for them. To-day they fought for Pon- 
tus, to-morrow for Pergamos. They 
changed their allies as they changed 
their coats, and the power for which 
they fought was usually assured of vie- 



ANCYRA 193 

tory by the terror of their name. The 
Pergamene marbles in the museum of 
Berlin which a competent critic has pro- 
nounced worthy the chisel of Phidias, 
and the statue of the dying Gaul falsely 
named cc The dying Gladiator/' which 
adorns the Vatican, are memorials by 
which Pergamos commemorated her vic- 
tory over the arrogant Galatians. In spite 
of this defeat their individual prowess 
long remained preeminent. Four hun- 
dred Galatian giants armed and equipped 
with unequaled splendor formed the 
body-guard of Cleopatra until, with 
characteristic fickleness, they took a 
similar position under Herod, her bit- 
terest enemy. 

When the Gauls entered Asia they 
brought with them the religion of the 
Druids, and practiced its mysteries in 
the forests of the Dryads. Of these the 
Sacred Grove at Tavium, with its bronze 
Jupiter substituted for the branch of 



i 9 4 CITIES OF PAUL 

mistletoe, was a memorial. They changed 
their creed as lightly as their descendants 
adopted and discarded the teachings of 
Paul. They worshiped Cybele with a 
fervor which made their country her 
Mecca, and led a Roman writer into the 
mistake of thinking her priests were 
called cc Galli " because they were Gauls. 
That veer of the weathercock anchored 
it forever in the history of Rome. 

The year 204 b. c. shed a deadly gloom 
over Italy. Hannibal had devastated her 
plains, and intrenched himself among 
her mountains. The last Scipio of the 
lion's brood was in Africa. The Roman 
army retained for home defense was 
threatened by pestilence, with annihila- 
tion. Rome had passed nine days in fast- 
ing, sacrifice, and prayer, but the unseen 
powers gave no sign. The people had 
almost wholly lost heart, when an appall- 
ing visitation sharpened their apprehen- 
sion into panic. A shower of meteorites, 



ANCYRA 195 

such as no living Roman had ever seen, 
descended. They thought the day of 
doom had come. An obscure prophecy 
in the Sibylline books suggested the only 
hope of salvation. The fire from the sky 
was interpreted to mean that the gods 
would be appeased if the image of the 
Great Mother which had fallen from 
heaven at Pessinus were brought to Rome 
and fitly honored there. Instantly an 
embassy was sent to Galatia. Would 
the priests of Cybele permit the object 
of their adoration to be taken from its 
shrine? More than upon their armies, 
more than upon the genius of their Scipio, 
the hopes of the Romans hung upon the 
answer to that question. 

What arguments were urged to per- 
suade them is not known, but the rulers 
of Pessinus answered " Yes ! " 

With pomp of decorated galleys 
and priestly pride the black stone was 
brought to the Tiber. The most blame- 



196 CITIES OF PAUL 

less man and the most faultless woman 
in the state must be discovered to receive 
the treasure in the city's name. After 
long debate the young Publius Scipio 
was judged to be the most virtuous man 
and Publia Quinta the worthiest woman. 
Preparations for the reception had been 
completed when, as Herodian reports, 
an unexpected difficulty arose. The ves- 
sel bearing the precious freight stuck fast 
in the mud. All the resources of the 
nation could not budge it, for Cybele 
herself held it immovable. What should 
be done ? A priestess of Vesta had been 
sentenced to death for infidelity. She 
prayed that her innocence might be sub- 
mitted to the Great Mother for decision. 
Her prayer was granted. Entering the 
water, she unbound her girdle, fastened 
it to the vessel's prow, drew it easily into 
deep water, and was of course proved 
spotless. 

Without vouching for the truth of this 



ANCYRA 197 

subordinate episbde, which was probably 
invented to mitigate the jealousy between 
the priests of Asia and those of Italy, by 
showing that Cybele and Vesta were 
friends, I return to undisputed history. 
Scipio, followed by all the senators in 
scarlet, and Quinta, leading the most illus- 
trious dames of Rome in their best gowns, 
met the ship at Ostia, took possession of 
the sacred stone, and escorted it to the 
capital. The ladies danced before it ; the 
statesmen marched beside it to the shrine 
prepared upon the Palatine. Thus began 
the festival of the Roman Madonna 
called the Megalesia. A temple of white 
marble which twelve years were needed 
to complete was erected for the shrine 
of the goddess. An order of ministers 
named from the Gallic priests was es- 
tablished to serve her. For six days 
every April the doors of the wealthy were 
opened, revealing tables laden with food 
and wine, around which images of 



1 98 CITIES OF PAUL 

the great gods were seated with Cybele. 
Whosoever would might enter and par- 
take without money and without price. 
Prisoners were set free. Senators formed 
processions to the temple. The noblest 
matrons — even Vestals, it is believed — 
danced before them. In front of all, the 
black stone in a gilded chariot, to which 
were harnessed lions of solid silver, was 
drawn by priests who had bathed in 
blood. Slaves were obliged to keep out 
of sight. Plays illustrating the transpor- 
tation of the image from Galatia were 
performed in the theatres. The Imperial 
City never bestowed a tithe of such hon- 
ors upon Scipio for defeating Hannibal. 

Momentous as the change of the Ga- 
latians from the religion of the Druids 
to the worship of Cybele proved to 
Rome, another veer of the weathercock 
is more significant to us. 

The Emperor Augustus died in the 
fourteenth year of our era. During his 



ANCYRA 199 

reign more than in any other equal 
length of time those subordinate forces 
and facilities which cooperated with the 
life of Christ to assure the victory of 
Christianity were set in order. The 
Augustan was not only the Elizabethan 
age of Rome in literature, philosophy, 
and art ; it was also the period which is 
still the most important of all periods 
for the student of Christianity to under- 
stand. 

Though by no means a slave to van- 
ity, Augustus appreciated adequately the 
importance of his achievements, and was 
alive to the significance of most of the 
forces working under him. The method 
he took to perpetuate the memory of 
them was unique. 

The tomb he built upon the Campus 
Martius would merit notice if for no 
other reason than its beauty. It was a 
drum of Carrara marble more than two 
hundred feet in diameter, and higher 



200 CITIES OF PAUL 

than the reach of a man's hand. Upon 
the roof, which was nearly flat, rested a 
cone of earth covered to the top with 
evergreens, its apex surmounted by a 
bronze statue of himself. The whole 
was surrounded by two concentric walls, 
one of bronze, the other of marble, in- 
closing between them gardens where 
fountains played, streams rippled, flow- 
ers bloomed, and birds sang. On each 
side of the entrance, between the outer 
wall of marble and the inner one of 
bronze (which last was probably an orna- 
mental balustrade), stood a lofty bronze 
column. Upon these pillars the em- 
peror's will, his expenditures, and those 
acts of his reign which he considered the 
most important were inscribed. How 
priceless would this record be if we had 
it ! But it perished. Scarce a vestige of 
tomb, pillar, or inscription remains for 
our instruction. What price would be 
too great for a copy of those records ! 



ANCYRA 201 

Well, copies of them may be found in 
each of the three great libraries of Eu- 
rope, but those who placed them there 
brought them from Ancyra. 

Augustus was the first Caesar whom 
the Romans deified. When that new 
cult was sprung upon the empire, the 
people of Galatia, as was their wont, 
adopted it with such swift and hot en- 
thusiasm as made them recognized 
throughout Asia, and by the emperor 
himself for its stanchest devotees. As- 
sisted by contributions from other pro- 
vinces, they built a temple at Ancyra 
for the worship of the new divinity, and 
were granted, as a distinguishing mark 
of imperial favor, the right to inscribe 
upon its walls a copy of the records on 
the bronze pillars at Rome. The letters 
were cut deep into the marble through 
a glaze of vermilion, each letter plated 
with beaten gold. Though the temple 
is a ruin, its walls stand. The gold is 



202 CITIES OF PAUL 

gone. The vermilion has faded or scaled 
away. But the letters remain, a copy in 
Latin with a Greek translation by its 
side. To the fickleness of Galatians we 
owe this treasure no less than the still 
more precious Epistle of St. Paul. There 
is One who can make a weathercock do 
the work of an anchor. 

Thus Ancyra was blown about by 
every wind of doctrine, until under Con- 
stantine Christianity became the religion 
of the empire. Then of course she be- 
came a stalwart for Christ. But presently 
came a reaction. Julian, disgusted with 
the quarrels of the church, educated 
under conditions which forced his noble 
nature to become familiar with the ar- 
rogance and hypocrisy which had per- 
meated the Christian profession, and 
influenced in no small degree by cir- 
cumstances alluded to in my paper on 
Ephesus, headed a movement to efface 
Christianity and restore the old gods. He 



ANCYRA 203 

had tried to rebuild Jerusalem in order 
to falsify the supposed predictions of 
the Saviour, but had failed in the at- 
tempt. Exploding fire damp and other 
signs deemed supernatural had scared 
away even those Jews whose zeal set 
them digging into Mt. Moriah with 
silver spades and carrying rubbish in 
baskets of silver and gold, while their 
ladies bore away its dust in aprons of 
silk. He failed to restore even the walls 
of the city which he meant to honor be- 
cause it had rejected Christ. He had 
not yet met the monk to whom he said, 
" I am going to rebuild in the East the 
temple of the fire-worshipers ; where is 
your carpenter now ? " nor heard the 
reply, " He is at the Euphrates making 
a coffin for your Majesty." Though the 
defeat and ruin which forced him to say, 
" Galilean, thou hast conquered/' were 
approaching fast, for a little moment he 
seemed to be moving toward success. 



204 CITIES OF PAUL 

With the celerity acquired by long 
practice, Ancyra adopted Julian's views. 
To express his appreciation of her nim- 
bleness, before starting on the eastern 
campaign which cost him his life, he hon- 
ored her with an imperial visit. To com- 
memorate his coming her people raised 
a bronze pillar which remains to this day. 
Fragments of their citadel upon which 
they inscribed their indorsement of his 
apostasy are also preserved, and the in- 
scription is legible. 

It would be unfair to omit mention of 
what, as far as I know, is the only speci- 
men of steadfastness ever exhibited in 
Ancyra, and equally unfair to cover with 
silence the only act of cruelty attributed 
to Julian, though it has been attributed 
to him on insufficient evidence. 

In 361 a. d., when the emperor vis- 
ited Ancyra, there was in that place a 
presbyter conspicuous for the energy 
of his rebukes to apostate Christians. 



ANCYRA 205 

Day after day he tramped the streets 
reechoing Paul's cry in trumpet tones: — 

" O foolish Galatians, who hath be- 
witched you, that ye should not obey 
the truth? " " Who hath bewitched you? " 
"Who hath bewitched you? " 

The man was arrested and brought 
before the emperor. Brave as Paul, but 
without Paul's kindness or a trace of his 
tact, he broke forth with a fury of in- 
vective, arraigning the monarch for his 
apostasy and threatening speedy ven- 
geance from the Almighty upon him. 

It is a fact that Basil was carried from 
the imperial presence and pulled to 
pieces with red-hot pincers, but there is 
no proof that he died by the emperor's 
order, or even that the emperor knew of 
his fate until the devilish deed had been 
done. There is also no evidence that 
the steadfast man was a Galatian. 

When Julian's death had ended his 
crusade against the Cross, and Chris- 



206 CITIES OF PAUL 

tianity resumed her sceptre over the 
state, the conduct of Ancyra justified 
her reputation. She hastened back into 
the fold. 

The fifteenth century found her the 
residence of Bajazet and probably the 
stanchest fortress in his dominions. 
Here was the stronghold of the armies 
which terrorized Europe and kept Con- 
stantinople for years in a state of virtual 
siege, or rather of vassalage, since she 
purchased her nominal independence by 
large and frequent bribes. On the plain 
before the city was fought, 1402 a. d., 
the battle in which Tamerlane annihi- 
lated the power of Bajazet. Whether the 
conqueror imprisoned his vanquished 
rival in an iron cage and exhibited him 
as a sign of his triumph, as was for- 
merly believed, is uncertain. 

Tamerlane and Bajazet are gone, but 
Ancyra stands. The temple she reared 
to Augustus, then dedicated to Christ, 



ANCYRA 207 

and at last converted into a mosque for 
Allah, the pillar she raised to Julian 
and the inscription on the fragments of 
her ruined citadel, and, more than these, 
the Epistle of Paul to her people, tell 
us how easily, how swiftly, and how often 
she turned to each shifting wind. 

If you ask "What is her religion 
now ? ,3 the answer is that apparently 
tired of change, she seems at last to have 
hit upon a new device to satisfy her 
vacillating inclinations, and at present 
attempts to be all things at once. For 
here the Armenians have a large convent 
where the archbishop and his suffragans 
reside. Here the Roman Catholics main- 
tain four churches, the Jews have their 
synagogues, and the Mussulmans their 
mosques. And here any one who dis- 
covers an improved substitute for Chris- 
tianity may hope to find it easier than 
in most places to draw proselytes into 
his camp. 



IX 

TYANA 

THE PAGAN BETHLEHEM 

Some eighty miles a trifle west of north 
from Tarsus, and separated from that 
metropolis by a wall of mountains, stood 
Tyana. A small city, neither rich nor 
strong nor beautiful, it was before the 
Christian era in no way distinguished. 
The highway to the Orient passed its 
walls, but commerce never paused to 
make it an important market. No school 
of art or science gave it the dignity which 
exalted Tarsus and Alexandria. It con- 
tained no buildings or statues which could 
win admiration from travelers familiar 
with the temples of Smyrna or the sculp- 
tures of Pergamos. No springs exhaled 
intoxicating vapors to shroud it in the 
awe that hallowed Hierapolis. No myth- 



TYANA 209 

ical traditions clothed it in the sacred 
livery of Ephesus and Eleusis. No 
monarch of renown like the founder of 
Antioch had emptied his treasury by en- 
duing it with splendors to perpetuate his 
memory. Yet for more than two cen- 
turies this insignificant city enjoyed a 
celebrity wider probably than Bethlehem 
had gained before the birth of Constan- 
tine or Mecca before that of Amrou. A 
single event was the cradle of its fame. 

About the time when Joseph went up 
to be enrolled with Mary, his espoused 
wife, — for aught we know on the night 
when the angels sang to the shepherds, 
— Tyana gave birth to a marvelous man, 
a man for whose worship many temples 
were erected before a single building had 
been raised in any part of the world for 
the worship of Christ. The man's name 
was Apollonius, and the place of his 
birth became his surname, so that he 
was called " Apollonius of Tyana," as 



210 CITIES OF PAUL 

k 
the Saviour from the home of his child- 
hood was known as "Jesus of Naza- 
reth." 

This man is the unsolved puzzle of 
historians. All concede that his fasci- 
nating and mysterious personality filled 
an immense space in the early centuries, 
and that his influence was incalculably 
great ; but in their judgment of his char- 
acter and the source of his influence I 
have found no two writers in complete 
agreement, and few who do not appear 
to doubt their own conclusions. Between 
the worshipers of Apollonius, or rather 
between the worshipers of the mysterious 
being who passed for Apollonius and the 
worshipers of Christ, the subtlest and 
most significant spiritual conflict of the 
first three centuries was waged. In it 
the pagan prophet appeared for a time 
to have won the victory, though in fact 
he had only prepared the way before the 
face of our Saviour. 



TYANA 211 

To describe that conflict is the pur- 
pose of this paper. 

The reports of Apollonius which have 
reached us fall into three groups, — 
facts, probabilities, and fictions. The 
facts are few, the probabilities are im- 
portant, the fictions, though incredible, 
are significant, because they harmonize 
completely with the facts and the proba- 
bilities. 

I. We know how the man looked. 
His undoubted portrait preserved on 
coin or medal is familiar to scholars. 
The august face is bearded and crowned 
with laurel as Christ was crowned with 
thorns. The features are Greek and sug- 
gest "the front of Jove himself." But 
for the winning sweetness and gentleness 
in the curves of the lips the face might 
pass for the original of Ned's Jupiter 
Tonans. 

It is worthy of remark that the coun- 
tenance of this inscrutable enigma should 



212 CITIES OF PAUL 

have been so carefully preserved and so 
generally forgotten while no line of sculp- 
ture or drawing exists that gives the faint- 
est hint of the appearance of Him who 
in so many million homes is loved as an 
elder brother. 

We know that Apollonius was en- 
rolled among the gods ; that temples in 
various places were built for his worship, 
and that for a long though indefinite 
period he was the object of devout 
adoration. Early in the third century 
Caracalla visited Tyana, built and conse- 
crated a temple to him there, granted 
the right of Roman citizenship to the 
inhabitants of the place, and constituted 
it a cc sacred city." Not many years later 
Alexander Severus put the statue of 
Apollonius in his private oratory. The 
implacable Aurelian, though exasperated 
by the obstinacy with which Tyana had 
opposed his arms, when, after a sternly 
resisted siege, he captured it, treated the 



TYANA 213 

inhabitants with distinguished honor and 
shed no blood except that of the traitor 
who betrayed the city into his hands. 
There is no plausible explanation of a 
clemency unparalleled elsewhere in the 
career of that cruel conqueror, except 
the explanation made by himself, that he 
obeyed the command given him in a 
vision by Apollonius. 

It is certain that at the request of the 
Empress Domna, the mother of Cara- 
calla, Philostratos wrote a book which 
some call a religious novel with Apol- 
lonius for its hero, which others call his 
" Memorabilia/' but which his disci- 
ples regarded as " the Gospel of Apollo- 
nius," precisely as we name the writings 
of the evangelists the " Gospels " or 
" Good News " of Christ. The impossi- 
bility of distinguishing sharply the facts 
from the fictions in this book has veiled 
in impenetrable mist the personality of 
its hero. 



2i4 CITIES OF PAUL 

II. The probabilities. The evidence 
in hand leaves no reasonable doubt that 
Apollonius was not only a man of com- 
manding genius, but that he was also a 
character entitled, by purity of purpose 
and unselfish desire to bless his fellow- 
men both by deeds of beneficence and 
by giving them truer conceptions of 
deity and duty, to be classed with Soc- 
rates and almost with St. Paul. Though 
this seems to me certain, I put it among 
the probabilities because one or two 
writers of repute count him only the best 
among that herd of self-seeking thauma- 
turgists who thronged the first centu- 
ries. 

A collection of his letters said to have 
been made by Hadrian still exists, but 
critics are at odds about them. Whether 
all of them, or some of them, or none of 
them are genuine cannot be determined. 
It seems certain that he was personally 
known to Vespasian and Titus, the two 



TYANA 215 

most excellent emperors between Au- 
gustus and Trajan, and it is probable that 
he exerted an appreciable influence upon 
their policies. It seems indubitable that, 
probably without knowing whence the 
influence came, he was himself powerfully 
influenced by the teachings of Christ. 
He was educated first at Tarsus and 
afterward at iEgae, very near that place. 
It is therefore not incredible that he met 
Paul, perhaps saw him frequently, for 
the two boys, though one was a Jew and 
the other a Gentile, were both aristocrats, 
each of them hungered after righteous- 
ness, and each of them had that gift of 
keen observation which nothing worth 
noting in mice or men escapes. 

III. The improbabilities. These, 
though incredible to us, were believed by 
his disciples as sincerely as the majority 
of Christians to-day credit the miracles 
of Christ. I cull a few of them from that 
fascinating book which may be named 



216 CITIES OF PAUL 

cc The Gospel of Apollonius according 
to Philostratos." 

It would be superfluous to point out 
the resemblances they bear to the facts 
in our Saviour's life. 

Apollonius had no mortal father, but 
was born to an invisible deity. Swans 
sang over his cradle songs which pro- 
claimed the advent of a Saviour. When 
a child he was taken by his parents to 
Tarsus, where the learned doctors wel- 
comed him. Repelled by the wickedness 
of that splendid city, he begged and ob- 
tained permission from his parents to 
retire into the quiet village of iEgae. 
Here he grew up in obscurity, finding 
favor with God and man. The rest of 
his life he spent going about doing good, 
teaching, healing, comforting those that 
mourned. Though the heart of his in- 
struction was that men should love their 
neighbors as themselves and practice self- 
denial for the benefit of their fellows, he 



TYANA 217 

seems to have escaped all taint of that 
vicious notion which had infected the 
whole pagan world, and was beginning to 
distemper Christianity with the belief 
that it is meritorious to do disagreeable 
things merely because one hates to. He 
would go through fire to rescue the 
burning, but he would not walk on nails 
for no other reason than that they hurt. 
On one occasion at Ephesus a flock 
of sparrows lighted on a tree near the 
place where he was preaching. Presently 
another sparrow flew to them, uttering a 
peculiar cry, whereupon they all darted 
off together. " Watch the sparrows," he 
exclaimed, " and learn from them. That 
little bird has found some grain, and in- 
stead of trying to eat it all himself has 
called his fellows to share his wealth. If 
you did the same you would be called 
spendthrifts. " With that he ended his 
sermon and sent his hearers to cc consider 
the sparrows." They found the birds 



218 CITIES OF PAUL 

feasting upon wheat which a boy in the 
street had spilled from his basket. 

At Rome he met a procession bearing 
to the grave the body of a nobleman's 
young daughter. He bade the bearers 
set down the bier, touched the corpse, 
and spoke a few words in a low voice. 
Immediately the maid opened her eyes, 
arose, and returned to her father's house, 
cc as Alcestis did of old when recalled to 
life by Hercules." Her relatives gave 
him a thank offering of one hundred and 
fifty thousand drachmas, which he settled 
upon the damsel for a marriage portion. 

The manner of his departure from this 
world is variously reported, but all ac- 
counts agree that it was not by death. 
After his translation a young man who 
did not believe in the immortality of the 
soul, and was preaching a crusade against 
those who did, visited Tyana. There 
Apollonius appeared to him, convinced 
him of his error, told him many things 



TYANA 219 

of the life to come, and sent him forth 
an eloquent advocate of the doctrine he 
had before denounced. 

Most of the teachings attributed by 
Philostratos to Apollonius savor of the 
New Testament. But to the New Tes- 
tament they 

" Are as moonlight unto sunlight, and as water unto 



wine." 



Which of them were uttered by the sage, 
and which were coined by his biographer, 
it is not possible to say. Those, however, 
whom Dr. Bushnell has failed to con- 
vince that the character portrayed in the 
gospels is beyond the power of the hu- 
man imagination to invent, will probably 
find their doubts dissolved by a compari- 
son of Philostratos with Matthew, Mark, 
or Luke. Philostratos possessed super- 
lative culture, high moral sensibility, and 
great literary skill. He had to help him a 
very considerable familiarity with the say- 
ings of Christ. Yet in trying to present 



220 CITIES OF PAUL 

a perfect character he has painted an ideal 
which before Jesus of Nazareth flickers 
as a thieved and gutted candle brought 
into sunlight. 

There is no evidence that Apollo- 
nius trained disciples or attempted to 
found a new school of either philosophy 
or religion. He seems to have " gone 
about doing good/' trying to learn and 
to teach the truth without thinking of 
his reputation or taking consciously any 
measures to perpetuate his influence. 
After his death, however, his fame grew 
steadily. Early in the third century, when 
he had long been worshiped, his influ- 
ence was immensely increased by the act 
of a broken-hearted woman. This is the 
story : — 

There lived at Emesa two sisters. 
They were Syrian peasants. Their 
names were Domna and Maesa. They 
worshiped the sun, and both of them 
seem to have been attached in some 



TYANA 221 

capacity to the famous temple of that 
divinity in their city. Domna had gained 
celebrity for skill in astrology. A certain 
widowed Roman general, a firm believer 
in that pseudo-science, hearing that her 
horoscope had marked her as the wife 
of an emperor, sought out and married 
her. 

This general, the most gifted captain 
of his age, cold, crafty, cruel, not like 
Caligula with the cruelty of fitful passion, 
but like Napoleon with the cruelty of 
deliberate policy, unscrupulous, super- 
stitious, and insatiably ambitious, became 
in 193 a. d. by usurpation the Emperor 
Septimius Severus. No small part of his 
eminent achievements were due to his 
wife, Domna, the peasant girl. She was 
a woman of rare genius, strong will, and 
ambition, almost equal to her husband's. 
But she possessed what he lacked, a 
heart. Her character was not good. In 
our day it would seem extremely bad. 



222 CITIES OF PAUL 

But for a Roman empress in her time it 
served well enough, and could not well 
be criticised by society which had ac- 
cepted Caligula as god and Faustina as 
madonna. For a time husband and wife 
lived in close amity, each leaning upon 
the talents of the other. They had two 
sons, Caracalla and Geta. But time, which 
generally brings trouble to families where 
selfishness usurps the place of affection, 
had to be reckoned with. A favorite of 
the emperor, named Plautianus, jealous 
of Domna's influence, filled her hus- 
band's ears with slanders of his wife ; 
made him believe that she had planned 
to poison him. Her two sons, both cov- 
eting the crown, hated each other with 
a deadly hatred. She tried with all her 
power to reconcile them, but her efforts 
only made it more evident that each of 
them was determined to assassinate his 
brother. Their father, compelled to leave 
Rome for Britain, took both sons with 



TYANA 223 

him because he dared not leave them 
behind. He died at York, probably 
poisoned by the elder of the two. They 
brought the ashes of their parent home. 
On the way neither dared to eat a mor- 
sel or drink a drop from the other's 
hand that had not been tested and proved 
free of poison. At Rome mother and 
sons, each of the latter protected by 
an armed guard from the dagger of his 
brother, celebrated the apotheosis of 
husband and father. When the obse- 
quies were over the widow called into 
the closet of her grief the two boys who 
were to share the throne between them, 
and said : — 

" You find means, my sons, to divide 
the earth and the seas between you, and 
the streams between them, you say, di- 
vide the two continents. But how will 
you be able to divide your mother ? How 
am I, your unhappy parent, to be torn 
asunder and shared between you both ? 



224 CITIES OF PAUL 

There is but one way. First, sheathe 
your swords in my breast and then let 
my body be cut in two, that each prince 
may bury half his mother in his own 
territory. So shall I be equally parted 
between you together with your empire 
of earth and sea." 

Though Domna may not have ex- 
pressed her anguish in precisely these 
words which Herodian attributes to her, 
there is no doubt that they give a true 
conception of her despair; for Herodian 
was a contemporary, an honest reporter, 
and knew whereof he affirmed. 

The mother's pleadings were futile. 
Caracalla, hiding Macbeth's treachery 
beneath Iago's hypocrisy, persuaded her 
to invite his younger brother to meet him 
in her private chamber for a friendly con- 
ference. There he had concealed assas- 
sins who stabbed Geta in her arms while 
she vainly strove to make her body a 
shield against their daggers. 



TYANA 225 

Nor was this the bitterest drop in her 
cup. After the cruel deed had been done, 
because the anguish in her face inspired 
the sympathy of courtiers, the fratri- 
cide, by threats that if she refused to 
obey him he would slay her with the 
same weapon that had pierced the heart 
of her son, compelled her to put on gay 
garments, to dance, and to sing. 

cc When it is dark enough the stars 
come out." It is not strange that in the 
horror of this great darkness the tortured 
woman gazed eagerly upon the only star 
that shone in her sky. We are told that 
she sought consolation in philosophy ; 
that she spent whole days with its pro- 
fessors. 

For nearly two centuries the words of 
Him who came into the world to "heal 
the brokenhearted" had been slowly but 
surely penetrating to wider and yet wider 
horizons. Christianity was still the reli- 
gion of the poor and the lowly, but the 



226 CITIES OF PAUL 

teachings of Christ had permeated the air. 
They had been whispered in kitchens, 
shouted from the stakes of martyrs, 
scoffed at in palaces, murmured in hov- 
els. Executioners had marveled to see 
them give rest to the tortured and cour- 
age to cowards. Slaves had seen them 
transform ferocious masters into sympa- 
thetic friends, and masters had seen them 
change truculent slaves into obedient ser- 
vants. Pagan philosophers had vainly 
endeavored to explain how a superstition 
which seemed to them absurd could plant 
and foster honesty in thieves, kindness 
in professional assassins, generosity in 
misers, and valor in poltroons. But 
the facts were obvious and indubitable. 
Trajan, who had striven more zealously 
than any other Caesar for the strict en- 
forcement of established law, had recog- 
nized them and wrenched the law till it 
cracked to conform to them. He had 
ordered Pliny to shut his eyes when 



TYANA 227 

Christians refused to pour libations, and 
to disregard accusations unconfirmed by 
their own confessions. 

Thus the words of Christ penetrated 
all atmospheres. Domna had heard, but 
thought little of them in the days of her 
pride when her heart was whole. But 
when her heart was broken they came 
to her with power, though she knew 
not whence they came. Many of them 
were credited to Apollonius. His was 
a household name among the rich and 
the mighty, as was the name of Christ 
among the poor and the needy. Some 
of Christ's teachings Apollonius had re- 
peated, others he was believed to have 
originated. To Domna Christ was at 
best an obscure foreigner who had lived 
in the slums and been ignominiously gib- 
beted. Apollonius was a distinct and dei- 
fied personality, admired by philosophers 
and worshiped by aristocrats. Hungry 
for help, she commissioned Philostratos 



228 CITIES OF PAUL 

to collect all that could be learned of 
him. Thus the famous book came to 
be written, and a poor parody of our 
Saviour's life became the gospel of the 
Roman court. But the diluted gospel and* 
the tinseled Christ were insufficient. For 
a time they did some service. It was 
doubtless Domna's influence that sent 
her dastard son to Tyana and constrained 
him to build a temple and consecrate the 
city to the sham saviour, for in spite of 
his atrocity Caracalla appears to have 
given his mother all the affection it was 
in the power of his fiendish nature to 
bestow. But the sham saviour could not 
give the despairing woman the blessed- 
ness of them that mourn, for she died a 
suicide. Yet she lived until, through her 
influence, the worship of Apollonius had 
received a strong impulse and been put 
upon the way toward becoming the im- 
perial religion. That road was closed to 
it and opened to Christianity by the in- 



TYANA 229 

fluence of another and a very different 
woman, whose story runs parallel to 
hers. 

Domna's sister Maesa had two daugh- 
ters, cousins therefore of Caracalla and 
Geta. Their names were Soemis and Ma- 
maea. Each of them bore a son and each 
of the sons became an emperor. The son 
of Soemis was surpassingly beautiful. 
While still a boy he was made a priest 
of the Sun. His splendid appearance 
fascinated the soldiers, and by the machi- 
nations of his mother he was placed upon 
the throne of the Caesars. There he dis- 
graced humanity by an ostentatious de- 
pravity which exceeded the obscenities of 
Nero, and had no trace of those artistic 
qualities which make it possible to be- 
lieve that even Nero was once a man. 
In less than four years this son, the Em- 
peror Heliogabalus, with his mother, 
perished at the hands of an exasperated 
soldiery and an outraged people, who 



230 CITIES OF PAUL 

murdered them and threw their bodies 
into the Tiber. 

The son of Mamaea met a different 
fate. His mother had in some way been 
drawn to Christianity. Perhaps it was 
only that she clung to the best there 
was in the religion fostered by her aunt 
Domna, and was by that led toward 
the light. However that may be, she 
adopted the principles of Christ and 
trained her son to obey them. 

Now there was at Alexandria one of 
the wisest, devoutest, and most per- 
suasive Christians who have ever lived. 
In knowledge of the Scriptures no one 
equaled him, in classical learning no one 
excelled him, in powers of persuasion 
no one approached him. His name was 
Origen. Before her son's character was 
fully formed, and probably to confirm 
convictions which had already nearly, 
if not wholly, mastered her, she sent for 
this man. He spent a considerable time 



TYANA 231 

with her. It cannot be doubted that all 
his matchless abilities were strained to 
lead her into a deeper devotion to Christ. 
Her conduct shows that he succeeded. 
Her conceptions of life and its duties 
were antipodal to those of her mother 
and her sister. In place of the diabolical 
ambition which ruined the other mem- 
bers of her family, there appeared in her 
a genuine patriotism. Before her son 
was fifteen the army forced Elagabalus, 
who had just failed in an attempt to 
murder him, to appoint him successor 
to the throne. Mamasa guarded her boy 
with wise and tender care. She sur- 
rounded him with the best and ablest 
men in Rome. Without taking him 
out of the world, her resolute will and 
motherly tact kept him from the evil 
and prepared him for the high place 
to which Providence had called him. 

When he became emperor under the 
name of Alexander Severus, the court 



232 CITIES OF PAUL 

was immediately reformed. A change 
more instantaneous than that which, 
when William took the helm that James 
had fled from, swept Jeffreys from the 
chancellorship and drove Claverhouse 
into exile, renovated Rome. The great 
jurists whom Elagabalus had dismissed 
that he might fill their places with men 
selected from the gutters, the race-course, 
and the arena, for no other reason than 
their bull necks and brawny breasts and 
bestial proclivities, were recalled to of- 
fice. Papinian, the greatest jurist Rome 
ever produced, had been murdered by 
Caracalla because when commanded to 
palliate before the Senate Geta's assas- 
sination he replied that it was easier to 
commit fratricide than to justify it ; but 
Ulpian and Paulus still lived and gave 
lustre to the new administration. 

Severus sought counsel from the best 
men in the empire, and was swayed by 
their advice, but to the close of his life 



TYANA 233 

his mother was his chief and most trusted 
guide. Abuses were corrected, morals 
were purified. Nine years of peaceful 
prosperity followed his accession, during 
all of which the example of a family 
Christian in all but name was given to 
the Roman world by the relations be- 
tween the emperor and his mother ; and 
though the last five of the fourteen years 
of his beneficent reign were agitated by 
wars which the wickedness of former 
rulers had made inevitable, they were 
wars which proved that the influence 
which made him just and gentle in peace 
had also made him brave and generous 
in war. 

This upright man, devoted son, and 
beneficent sovereign placed in his pri- 
vate oratory four statues. They repre- 
sented Orpheus, Abraham, Apollonius, 
and Jesus of Nazareth. To our minds 
this may seem an inexplicable combina- 
tion. What relation has Orpheus to 



234 CITIES OF PAUL 

Abraham or Apollonius to Christ? we 
naturally ask. But had we lived in Rome 
at the court of Alexander, the group- 
ing would have seemed to us appropri- 
ate, and would have told us a plain and 
most impressive fact. 

Orpheus had long been accepted by 
Pythagoreans as the one whose resur- 
rection proved immortality ; whose lyre 
showed that persuasion is more powerful 
than force ; whose rescue of Eurydice 
proclaimed the victory of self-sacrificing 
love over all things, even over death. 
The members of the Orphic societies, 
though few in number, were the salt of 
the heathen world. Their white gar- 
ments were a protest against the scarlet 
splendors of pagan debauchery. Their 
ascetic rules, which forbade the use of 
animal food, and cultivated plain living 
and high thinking, were a perpetual re- 
buke to the purple and fine linen of 
those who fared sumptuously every day 



TYANA 235 

and did nothing else. They had done 
much to prepare the way before Apol- 
lonius, who had himself been a Pytha- 
gorean or was believed to have been one. 
As Christ was the ultimate fruit of all 
the good which had grown for centuries 
in Judaea, Apollonius was the consum- 
mation of the best that Greece and Rome 
had been able to produce. As Orpheus 
passed for the spiritual ancestor of Apol- 
lonius, Abraham bore a similar relation 
to Christ. Such was the reasoning. The 
idea of the unity of God had not yet 
mastered the Gentile mind. That there 
should be two divinities with equal claims 
to worship would not seem strange to 
Romans. 

The strongest trait in Alexander's char- 
acter was family affection. It had kept 
him loyal to Elagabalus in spite of that 
monster's unspeakable infamy, in spite 
of the monster's attempt to murder him. 
At a time when no one could oppose the 



236 CITIES OF PAUL 

will of the army without risking his life, 
it had kept him from yielding a hair's 
breadth to the clamors of an infuriated 
soldiery bent on forcing him to usurp his 
cousin's throne. For many years the 
strong will of his great-aunt Domna had 
been the controlling influence in his fam- 
ily. What then could be more natural 
than that reverence for her should lead 
him to place the statue of the god she 
had taught him to revere beside the im- 
age of the God his mother had taught 
him to worship ? 

However this may be, in his oratory 
Christianity was for the first time raised 
before the whole Roman Empire to an 
equality with the loftiest cult of pagan- 
ism. It might still be hated, it might still 
be fought, — and so it was at intervals 
for a hundred years, — but it could never 
again be, as it had been, despised. In a 
century almost to the year from the day 
on which Alexander put the statue of 



TYANA 237 

Jesus beside that of Apollonius, Con- 
stantine placed the Cross above the 
eagles and made Christianity legally the 
religion of the empire. 

Gradually the gospel according to 
Philostratos, the splendid rhetorician, 
faded from human memory, and the 
gospels according to the despised publi- 
can, the obscure disciple, the faithful 
physician, and the humble fisherman 
whom Jesus loved became the Bible of 
our race. For this we are indebted to the 
afflictions of Domna and the influence 
of Mamaea more than to the battle of the 
Milvian; to the unrecorded words of 
Origen whispered in the closet more 
than to the obtrusive sword of Constan- 
tine, and the in hoc signo trumpeted at 
the street corners of the world. 



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